Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 58: Active matter II (joint session BP/CPP/DY)

DY 58.3: Talk

Friday, April 5, 2019, 10:00–10:15, H11

Bead-spring modelling of triangular microswimmers — •Sebastian Ziegler¹, Alexander Sukhov², Jens Harting^2,3, and Ana-Sunčana Smith^1,4 — ¹PULS Group, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany — ²Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy, Germany — ³Dep. of Applied Physics, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands — ⁴Division of Physical Chemistry, Ruder Bošković Institute Zagreb, Croatia

A customary approach to model mechanical micropropulsion is to prescribe the swimming stroke. However, with this approach, the hydrodynamic features of the motion are in essence smoothed over and the problem becomes a purely geometrical one. The alternative approach, yet significantly more demanding, is to impose not the stroke itself but the forces driving the device. The swimming stroke then emerges as a result of the various forces acting in the system. We use a perturbative approach to examine a triangular swimmer's behaviour in the Stokes regime that is also eligible for general geometries of bead-spring swimmers. The device shows a multifaceted comportment dependent on a number of therefore identified effective parameters. The triangular swimmer is further used as a prototype to study the influence of variations in the viscosity of the surrounding fluid on its motion.