Extensibility enables locomotion under isotropic drag

Anisotropic viscous drag is usually believed to be a requirement for the low Reynolds number locomotion of slender bodies such as flagella and cilia. Here, we show that locomotion under isotropic drag is possible for extensible slender bodies. After general considerations, a two-ring swimmer and a model dinoflagellate flagellum are studied analytically to illustrate how extensibility can be exploited for self-propulsion without drag anisotropy. This new degree of freedom could be useful for some complex swimmer geometries and locomotion in complex fluid environments where drag anisotropy is weak or even absent.

• Publication year

  2011

• Venue

  Physics of Fluids

• Publication date

  2011-08-19

• Fields of study

  Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1063/1.3624790arXiv 1109.0047
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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