Q-Tensor Model For Undulatory Swimming In Lyotropic Liquid Crystal Polymers
JOURNAL OF FLUID MECHANICS(2021)
摘要
Microorganisms may exhibit rich swimming behaviours in anisotropic fluids, such as liquid crystals, which have direction-dependent physical and rheological properties. Here we construct a two-dimensional computation model to study the undulatory swimming mechanisms of microswimmers in a solution of rigid, rodlike liquid crystal polymers. We describe the fluid phase using Doi's Q-tensor model, and treat the swimmer as a finite-length flexible fibre with imposed propagating travelling waves on the body curvature. The fluid-structure interactions are resolved via an immersed boundary method. Compared with the swimming dynamics in Newtonian fluids, we observe non-Newtonian behaviours that feature both enhanced and retarded swimming motions in lyotropic liquid crystal polymers. We reveal the propulsion mechanism by analysing the near-body flow fields and polymeric force distributions, together with asymptotic analysis for an idealized model of Taylor's swimming sheet.
更多查看译文
关键词
micro-organism dynamics, liquid crystals
AI 理解论文
溯源树
样例
生成溯源树,研究论文发展脉络
Chat Paper
正在生成论文摘要