Physics of rheologically enhanced propulsion: Different strokes in generalized Stokes

By Thomas D. Montenegro-Johnson, Daniel Loghin, David. J. Smith. 2013

92 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Shear-thinning is an important rheological property of many biological fluids, such as mucus, whereby the apparent viscosity of the fluid decreases with shear. Certain microscopic swimmers have been shown to progress more rapidly through shear-thinning fluids, but is this behavior generic to all microscopic swimmers, and what are the physics through which shear-thinning rheology affects a swimmer's propulsion? We examine swimmers employing prescribed stroke kinematics in two-dimensional, inertialess Carreau fluid: shear-thinning “generalized Stokes” flow. Swimmers are modeled, using the method of femlets, by a set of immersed, regularized forces. The equations governing the fluid dynamics are then discretized over a body-fitted mesh and solved with the finite element method. We analyze the locomotion of three distinct classes of microswimmer: (1) conceptual swimmers comprising sliding spheres employing both one- and two-dimensional strokes, (2) slip-velocity envelope models of ciliates commonly referred t...

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f33112592dfe446d911c1dfe3ac2ea47057dcb81

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “…work showed that breaking time-reversal symmetry is no longer a requirement in non-Newtonian fluids (Fu et al., 2009; Keim et al., 2012; Montenegro-Johnson et al., 2013; Qiu et al., 2014), where motion by periodic body-shape changes is possible when backward and forward strokes occur…”
Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids (2021, background): “5e) and causes two effects: a local confinement of the swimmer, which enhances the swimming speed [114,161], and reduction of fluid forces which tends to hinder locomotion [158,160,162].”