| Issue |
EPL
Volume 123, Number 3, August 2018
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 34002 | |
| Number of page(s) | 6 | |
| Section | Electromagnetism, Optics, Acoustics, Heat Transfer, Classical Mechanics, and Fluid Dynamics | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/123/34002 | |
| Published online | 27 August 2018 | |
A three-sphere microswimmer in a structured fluid
1 Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, Tokyo Metropolitan University - Tokyo 192-0397, Japan
2 Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Science, Okayama University - Okayama 700-8530, Japan
Received: 21 May 2018
Accepted: 27 July 2018
We discuss the locomotion of a three-sphere microswimmer in a viscoelastic structured fluid characterized by typical length and time scales. We derive a general expression to link the average swimming velocity to the sphere mobilities. In this relationship, a viscous contribution exists when the time-reversal symmetry is broken, whereas an elastic contribution is present when the structural symmetry of the microswimmer is broken. As an example of a structured fluid, we consider a polymer gel, which is described by a “two-fluid” model. We demonstrate in detail that the competition between the swimmer size and the polymer mesh size gives rise to the rich dynamics of a three-sphere microswimmer.
PACS: 47.63.Gd – Swimming microorganisms / 47.63.mf – Low-Reynolds-number motions / 82.70.Gg – Gels and sols
© EPLA, 2018
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.