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Slender body theories for rotating filaments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2022

Ondrej Maxian*
Affiliation:
Mathematics, New York University, 251 Mercer St, New York, NY 10012, USA
Aleksandar Donev
Affiliation:
Mathematics, New York University, 251 Mercer St, New York, NY 10012, USA
*
Email address for correspondence: om759@nyu.edu

Abstract

Slender fibres are ubiquitous in biology, physics and engineering, with prominent examples including bacterial flagella and cytoskeletal fibres. In this setting, slender body theories (SBTs), which give the resistance on the fibre asymptotically in its slenderness $\epsilon$, are useful tools for both analysis and computations. However, a difficulty arises when accounting for twist and cross-sectional rotation: because the angular velocity of a filament can vary depending on the order of magnitude of the applied torque, asymptotic theories must give accurate results for rotational dynamics over a range of angular velocities. In this paper, we first survey the challenges in applying existing SBTs, which are based on either singularity or full boundary integral representations, to rotating filaments, showing in particular that they fail to consistently treat rotation–translation coupling in curved filaments. We then provide an alternative approach which approximates the three-dimensional dynamics via a one-dimensional line integral of Rotne–Prager–Yamakawa regularized singularities. While unable to accurately resolve the flow field near the filament, this approach gives a grand mobility with symmetric rotation–translation and translation–rotation coupling, making it applicable to a broad range of angular velocities. To restore fidelity to the three-dimensional filament geometry, we use our regularized singularity model to inform a simple empirical equation which relates the mean force and torque along the filament centreline to the translational and rotational velocity of the cross-section. The single unknown coefficient in the model is estimated numerically from three-dimensional boundary integral calculations on a rotating, curved filament.

Information

Type
JFM 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, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Figure 1. Error in the rotation–translation SBT relative to the boundary integral calculation for various $\epsilon$ and $k$ and two different fibre shapes. The fibre shapes we consider, shifted so that their midpoints coincide, are shown in (a). For each fibre, we prescribe a rotational velocity $\varPsi ^\parallel \equiv 1/a^2$ with translational velocity $\boldsymbol {U}=\boldsymbol {0}$. We then solve the boundary integral equation (4.2) for the surface traction, use (2.15) and (2.16) to obtain the centreline force density and parallel torque density, and then (4.3) to obtain an SBT velocity $\boldsymbol {U}_{SB}$ from these densities. We plot the $L^2$ norm of $\boldsymbol {U}_{SB}$ (which should be zero) for several different values of $k$. For $k \neq 2.85$, results are shown only for the half-helix (4.15), and the error is clearly $O(1)$ with respect to $\epsilon$. For $k=2.85$, the error decreases with $\epsilon$ at a rate of roughly $\epsilon ^1$, independent of the fibre shape considered. The data points here come from the most refined discretization in figure 2, while the error bars are the difference between the most refined and second-most refined calculation.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Convergence plot for the curved rotating filament (4.15) studied in § 4.2. We show the self-convergence of our numerical method for (a) the force $\boldsymbol {f}$ and (b) the parallel torque $n^\parallel$ on each cross-section. The ‘error’ is the $L^2$ difference of each quantity relative to the next level of refinement, normalized by the $L^2$ norm of the most refined solution.

Figure 2

Figure 3. The SBT asymptotic errors for rotational velocity in the fully coupled problem. We show how the relative error $a^2(\varPsi ^\parallel _{SB}-\varPsi ^\parallel )$ changes as we change $\epsilon$ and the total number of discretization points $N_t$. The SBT rotational velocity $\varPsi ^\parallel _{SB}$ is computed from (4.4) and is dominated by rotation–rotation dynamics. It therefore does not depend on $k$, and so we show only a single $k=2.85$.

Figure 3

Figure 4. The SBT asymptotic errors for translational velocity in the fully coupled problem. We show how the error in the slender body velocity $\boldsymbol {U}_{SB}$ changes as we refine the number of discretization points and the fibre aspect ratio. Here the velocity $\boldsymbol {U}_{SB}$ is computed using (4.3) with the value of $k$ indicated in the legend.