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Anisotropic swimming and reorientation of an undulatory microswimmer in liquid-crystalline polymers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2022

Zhaowu Lin
Affiliation:
Department of Engineering Mechanics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, PR China Department of Mechanical Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48864, USA
Zhaosheng Yu
Affiliation:
Department of Engineering Mechanics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, PR China
Jinxing Li
Affiliation:
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48864, USA Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48864, USA
Tong Gao*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48864, USA Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48864, USA
*
Email address for correspondence: gaotong@egr.msu.edu

Abstract

Microorganisms can efficiently navigate in anisotropic complex fluids, but the precise swimming mechanisms remain largely unexplored. Their dynamics is determined by the interplay between multiple effects, including the fluid's orientation order, swimmer's undulatory gait and the finite length. Here, we extend the numerical study of the two-dimensional undulatory motions of a flexible swimmer in lyotropic liquid-crystalline polymers (LCPs) by Lin et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 921, 2021, p. A25) to the scenario of arbitrary swimming directions with respect to the nematic director. The swimmer is modelled as a nearly inextensible yet flexible fibre with imposed travelling-wave-like actuation. We investigate the orientation-dependent swimming behaviours in nematic LCPs for an infinitely long sheet (i.e. Taylor's swimming sheet model) and finite-length swimmers. We demonstrate that the swimmer must be sufficiently stiff to produce undulatory deformations to gain net motions. Moreover, a motile finite-length swimmer can reorient itself to swim parallel with the nematic director, due to a net body torque arising from the asymmetric distribution of the polymer force along the body.

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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. The mean-speed ratio $U_{LC}/U_N$ of an infinite-length sheet as a function of alignment angle $\theta$ in nematic LCPs ($\zeta = 50$, $\beta = 0$, $\textit {Pe}_t^{-1} = 0.001$). (a) Asymptotic solutions of Taylor's swimming sheet. (b) Results of numerical simulations for a stiff sheet when choosing ${\sigma _b} = 0.5$. The rescaled net polymer force ${\bar {F}}_p$ (c) and torque ${\bar {T}}_p$ (d) as functions of time at different $\theta$.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Reorientation of a stiff (${\sigma _b} = 0.5$), finite-length ($L_s = 1$) swimmer in nematic LCPs ($\zeta = 8$, $\beta = 0.005$, $\textit {Pe} = 1$, $\textit {Pe}_t^{-1} = 0.02$), initially when choosing $\theta = {\rm \pi}/6$ (ac) and ${\rm \pi} /3$ (df). (a,d) Sequential snapshots of swimmer shape during the transient. The background shows the typical nematic director distributions at certain time instants. The arrow denotes the swimming direction at quasi-steady states. Insets: instantaneous polymer force distributions $\boldsymbol {F}_p(s, t)$. The net polymer force (b,e) and torque (c,f) are plotted as functions of time, with both the instantaneous (light-colour lines) and the moving-averaged (dark-colour lines) values.

Figure 2

Figure 3. The characteristic polymer force $\left \langle \boldsymbol {f}_p\right \rangle$ and fluid velocity $\left \langle \boldsymbol {u}\right \rangle$ near the stiff (${\sigma _b} = 0.5$) swimmer superimposed on their magnitudes, corresponding to the case in figure 2(ac) when $\theta = {\rm \pi}/6$ initially.

Figure 3

Figure 4. Sequential snapshots of finite-length ($L_s = 1$) swimmers undulating in nematic LCPs ($\zeta = 8$, $\beta = 0.005$, $\textit {Pe} = 1$, $\textit {Pe}_t^{-1} = 0.02$), when choosing the different bending stiffnesses ($\sigma _b = 0.005, 0.05$) and initial angles ($\theta = {\rm \pi}/6, {\rm \pi}/3$). The background shows the typical nematic director distributions at certain time instants. The initial shape is marked by the black colour. In panels (a,b), typical instantaneous shapes at quasi-steady states are marked by purple colour; in panels (c,d), the transient shapes are taken at $t = 20$ (red), $40$ (blue), $60$ (purple), $80$ (green), with the green arrow denoting the swimming direction at $t=80$. Insets in (a,b): instantaneous polymer force $\boldsymbol {F}_p(s, t)$ at late times.

Figure 4

Figure 5. Reorientation dynamics of the swimmer in nematic LCPs ($\zeta = 8$) measured by the moving-averaged orientation angle $\left \langle \phi (t)\right \rangle$ when the initial alignment angle is chosen as ${\rm \pi} /6$ (a) and ${\rm \pi} /3$ (b) where $\sigma _b$ varies over three orders of magnitudes.

Figure 5

Figure 6. Rotation time $\tau _R$ as a function of the initial alignment angle $\theta$ for $\sigma _b = 0.2, 0.5$.

Figure 6

Figure 7. Time-averaged centre-of-mass speed $U_{OB}$ for undulatory swimming motion in an OB fluid when choosing ${De} = 1$.

Figure 7

Figure 8. Convergence tests with the time-dependent centre-of-mass velocity $u_x$ and $u_y$ when changing (a) the Eulerian grid width, (b) the domain size and (c) the bending stiffness $\sigma _b$. These parameters are fixed: $\sigma _s = 500$, ${\sigma _b} = 0.5$, $A= 0.01$, $\textit {Pe} = 1$, $\textit {Er} = 1$, $\zeta = 8$, ${\textit {Pe}_t}^{-1} = 0.02$, $\beta = 0.0005$ and $\theta = {\rm \pi}/6$.

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