Reciprocal microswimmers in a viscoelastic fluid
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2006.08895,
title = {Reciprocal microswimmers in a viscoelastic fluid},
author = {Kento Yasuda and Mizuki Kuroda and Shigeyuki Komura},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.08895},
year = {2021}
}