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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Canonical orbits for rapidly deforming planar microswimmers in shear flow

Eamonn A. Gaffney1,*, Mohit P. Dalwadi1,2,†, Clément Moreau3,‡, Kenta Ishimoto3,§, and Benjamin J. Walker1,2,∥

  • 1Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX2 6GG, United Kingdom
  • 2Department of Mathematics, University College London, London, WC1H 0AY, United Kingdom
  • 3Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University, Kyoto, 606-8502, Japan

  • *gaffney@maths.ox.ac.uk
  • †m.dalwadi@ucl.ac.uk
  • ‡cmoreau@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp
  • §ishimoto@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp
  • ∥Corresponding author: benjamin.walker@ucl.ac.uk
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Phys. Rev. Fluids 7, L022101 – Published 18 February, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.L022101

Abstract

Classically, the rotation of ellipsoids in shear Stokes flow is captured by Jeffery's orbits. Here we demonstrate that Jeffery's orbits also describe high-frequency shape-deforming swimmers moving in the plane of a shear flow, employing only basic properties of Stokes flow and a multiple-scales asymptotic analysis. In doing so, we support the use of these simple models for capturing shape-changing swimmer dynamics in studies of active matter and highlight the ubiquity of ellipsoid-like dynamics in complex systems. This result is robust to weakly confounding effects, such as distant boundaries, and also applies in the low-frequency limit.

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References (28)

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Phys. Rev. Fluids 7, L022101– Published 18 February, 2022
  • Received 2 November 2021
  • Accepted 21 January 2022
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