Reciprocal microswimmers in a viscoelastic fluid
arXiv:2006.08895 · doi:10.1063/5.0018540
Abstract
We suggest several reciprocal swimming mechanisms that lead to a locomotion only in viscoelastic fluids. The first situation is to have a difference between the two amplitudes of the oscillatory arm motion for a three-sphere microswimmer. The second situation is when one of the frequencies of the arm motion is twice as large as the other one for a three-sphere microswimmer. The third situation is when the sphere sizes are different for a two-sphere microswimmer. In all these three cases, the average velocity is proportional to the imaginary part of the complex shear viscosity of a surrounding viscoelastic medium. It is essential for a micromachine to break its structural symmetry in order to swim in a viscoelastic fluid by performing reciprocal body motions.
References in corpus (12)
- The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms
- Analytic results for the three-sphere swimmer at low Reynolds number
- A basic swimmer at low Reynolds number
- Swimming speeds of filaments in nonlinearly viscoelastic fluids
- Theory of swimming filaments in viscoelastic media
- Continuous breakdown of Purcell's scallop theorem with inertia
- Magnetocapillary self-assemblies: locomotion and micromanipulation along a liquid interface
- Elastic three-sphere microswimmer in a viscous fluid
- Thermally Driven Elastic Micromachines
- Hydrodynamic interaction between two elastic microswimmers
- Swimmer-microrheology
- Life at high Deborah number