Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 27: Posters - Microswimmers
BP 27.3: Poster
Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 14:00–16:00, P2-EG
Inertial effects in microswimming — •Oleg Trosman1,2, Jayant Pande1,2, and Ana-Sunčana Smith1,2,3 — 1PULS group, Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany — 2Cluster of Excellence: Engineering of Advanced Materials, Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany — 3Division of Physical Chemistry, Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia
Increased theoretical study in the past few decades has enabled scientists to gain a deeper insight into the motion of micro-swimmers, yet most theoretical approaches addressed the domain of negligible Reynolds number Re, ignoring inertia. In nature, however, in an intermediate range of Re, before turbulences arise, the inertial effects become important. In this work we conduct a theoretical study of how this regime emerges. For this we extend the swimmer model by Golestanian and Najafi, which has three beads attached in series in a fluid and moving along the axis of the swimmer, by inclusion of the beads’ masses. We do this by combining the Oseen-Stokes equations for the coupled motion of distant spheres in a fluid with Newton’s force-mass relations and obtain a coupled system of first-order differential equations. Solving these equations allows us to derive a closed-form expression for the velocity of the swimmer which explicitly takes inertia into account. This velocity expression compares considerably better to results obtained from lattice-Boltzmann simulations of the swimmer, for intermediately high bead masses or driving forces, than the inertia-free model of Golestanian and Najafi.