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Dynamics of a treadmilling microswimmer near a no-slip wall in simple shear

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2017

Kenta Ishimoto*
Affiliation:
The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK
Darren G. Crowdy
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, 180 Queen’s Gate, London SW7 2AZ, UK
*
Email address for correspondence: ishimoto@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Abstract

Induction of flow is commonly used to control the migration of a microswimmer in a confined system such as a microchannel. The motion of a swimmer, in general, is governed by nonlinear equations due to non-trivial hydrodynamic interactions between the flow and the swimmer near a wall. This paper derives analytical expressions for the equations of motion governing a circular treadmilling swimmer in simple shear near a no-slip wall by combining the reciprocal theorem for Stokes flow with an exact solution for the dragging problem of a cylinder near a wall. We demonstrate that the reduced dynamical system possesses a Hamiltonian structure, which we use to show that the swimmer cannot migrate stably at a constant distance from a wall but only exhibit periodic oscillatory motion along the wall, or to escape from it. A treadmilling swimmer with the lowest two treadmilling modes is investigated in detail by means of a bifurcation analysis of the reduced dynamical system. It is found that the swimming direction of oscillatory motion is clarified by the sign of the Hamiltonian in the absence of flow, and that the induction of the flow suppresses upstream migration but aligns swimmer orientations in downstream migration. These results could inform strategies for the transport and control of micro-organisms and micromachines.

Information

Type
Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© 2017 Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Circular treadmiller, of radius $r$ and orientation $\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}(t)$, with centre $\boldsymbol{x}_{\boldsymbol{d}}(t)=(X(t),Y(t))$ above a no-slip wall along $y=0$.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Contours of integration in (a) the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D701}$ plane and (b) the $z$ plane.

Figure 2

Figure 3. Example trajectories of the two-mode swimmer without a shear flow. The swimmer parameter is set to $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}=2$ and the initial position is $(X,Y)=(0,1.2r)$, where the length scale is non-dimensionalized by selecting $r=1$. The different initial angles $\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}=0$ (a) and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}=2$ (b) lead to the two types of swimmer behaviour: escape from the wall (a) and periodic motion confined near a wall (b). The arrows indicate the swimming directions.

Figure 3

Figure 4. Contour of the Hamiltonian and the trajectory in the phase portrait for different values of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$. The arrows show the flow of the dynamical system and the white circles indicate equilibria of the system. The length scale is non-dimensionalized by $r=1$ and the velocity is non-dimensionalized by $V_{1}=1$ (ac) or $V_{2}=1$ (d).

Figure 4

Figure 5. Contours of the Hamiltonian plotted in polar coordinates $(\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C},\unicode[STIX]{x1D703})$ for different values of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$, where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}$ moves between 0 and 1. The angle $\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}$ indicates the swimmer orientation as shown in figure 1. The wall is depicted by a blue unit circle ($\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}=1$) and infinity is denoted by a point at the origin ($\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}=0$). The colour of the contour is graded from blue to red as the Hamiltonian increases from negative to positive values. Thus, a closed loop that passes through the origin represents escape from the wall, whereas time-periodic motion near a wall is expressed by a loop that does not contain the origin.

Figure 5

Figure 6. Trajectories of a swimmer in a shear flow. The swimmer trajectories are shown by red lines, and the swimmer at the final time of the computation is depicted by a blue circle, with its direction shown by an arrow. The swimmer parameter $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}=2$ and the shear strength $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}=0.2$ are fixed. The initial angle was set to $\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}=1$, and the positions are (a$(X,Y)=(0,1.4r)$, (b$(X,Y)=(0,1.6r)$, (c$(X,Y)=(0,1.62r)$; the initial positions of the swimmers are shown by small black dots. The shear flow is applied towards the $+x$ axis, and the swimmer can exhibit upstream migration (a,b) or a more complex trajectory (c), although these are periodic orbits in the phase space. The length scale is non-dimensionalized by $r=1$.