Hydrodynamics of self-propulsion near a boundary: predictions and accuracy of far-field approximations

By Saverio E. Spagnolie, Eric Lauga. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2012

469 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The swimming trajectories of self-propelled organisms or synthetic devices in a viscous fluid can be altered by hydrodynamic interactions with nearby boundaries. We explore a multipole description of swimming bodies and provide a general framework for studying the fluid-mediated modifications to swimming trajectories. A general axisymmetric swimmer is described as a linear combination of fundamental solutions to the Stokes equations: a Stokeslet dipole, a source dipole, a Stokeslet quadrupole, and a rotlet dipole. The effects of nearby walls or stress-free surfaces on swimming trajectories are described through the contribution of each singularity, and we address the question of how accurately this multipole approach captures the wall effects observed in full numerical solutions of the Stokes equations. The reduced model is used to provide simple but accurate predictions of the wall-induced attraction and pitching dynamics for model Janus particles, ciliated organisms, and bacteria-like polar swimmers. Transitions in attraction and pitching behaviour as functions of body geometry and propulsive mechanism are described. The reduced model may help to explain a number of recent experimental results.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ef3a4ff414e33d8acc60f277613121c8323e3f9

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Citations in the corpus

Physics of microswimmers—single particle motion and collective behavior: a review (2014, background): “For spherical or ellipsoidal squirmers, the importance of higher order terms has been studied (Spagnolie and Lauga, 2012).”
Active suspensions and their nonlinear models (2013, methodology): “The basic features of hydrodynamic interactions of spheroidal squirmers were recently analyzed theoretically by Spagnolie and Lauga [76], who showed a subtle dependence of hydrodynamic interactions with a rigid no-slip wall on the basic flow singularities driven by the particle, which are related to”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “Far-field predictions can be obtained considering the flow generated by the image singularities that need to be collocated inside a bounding wall in order to satisfy the no-slip boundary condition at the wall surface (Spagnolie and Lauga, 2012).”