Swimming of an assembly of rigid spheres at low Reynolds number

A matrix formulation is derived for the calculation of the swimming speed and the power required for swimming of an assembly of rigid spheres immersed in a viscous fluid of infinite extent. The spheres may have arbitrary radii and may interact with elastic forces. The analysis is based on the Stokes mobility matrix of the set of spheres, defined in low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. For small amplitude, swimming optimization of the swimming speed at given power leads to an eigenvalue problem. The method allows straightforward calculation of the swimming performance of structures modeled as assemblies of interacting rigid spheres.Graphical abstract

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  The European Physical Journal E : Soft matter

• Publication date

  2014-05-06

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1140/epje/i2014-14110-6arXiv 1405.1242PMID 25403834
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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