A bi-directional low-Reynolds-number swimmer with passive elastic arms

Jessie Levillain (1) , François Alouges (2) , Antonio Desimone (3) , Akash Choudhary (4) , Sankalp Nambiar (4) , Ida Bochert (5, 6)

1 CMAP - Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées - Ecole Polytechnique
2 CB - CB - Centre Borelli - UMR 9010
3 SISSA MathLab [Trieste]
4 IIT Kanpur - Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
5 Max Planck Institute for Medical Research [Heidelberg]
6 Universität Heidelberg [Heidelberg] = Heidelberg University

It has been recently shown that it is possible to design simple artificial swimmers at low Reynolds number that possess only one degree of freedom and, nevertheless, can overcome Purcell’s celebrated scallop theorem. One of the few examples is given by Montino and DeSimone, Eur. Phys. J. E, vol. 38, 2015, who consider the three-sphere Swimmer of Najafi and Golestanian, replacing one active arm with a passive elastic spring. We further generalize this idea by increasing the number of springs and show that it is possible to invert the swimming direction using the frequency of the single actuated arm.

Mots clés: Low reynolds number; ordinary differential equations; numerical analysis

Domaines: Physique mathématique [math-ph]; Analyse classique [math.CA]; Analyse numérique [math.NA]

Jessie Levillain, François Alouges, Antonio Desimone, Akash Choudhary, Sankalp Nambiar, et al.. A bi-directional low-Reynolds-number swimmer with passive elastic arms. ESAIM: Proceedings and Surveys, inPress. ⟨hal-04495504v3⟩