Meshfree and efficient modelling of swimming cells

TL;DR

This paper presents a meshfree, efficient computational method for simulating swimming cells in Stokes flow, enabling accurate and rapid modeling of biological motility with complex geometries.

Contribution

It introduces a meshfree discretisation of the regularised Stokeslet boundary integral that improves convergence and robustness for 3D biological fluid problems.

Findings

Method accurately simulates sperm and algae swimming behaviors.

Computations run efficiently on modest hardware within minutes.

Implementation is openly available in a GitHub repository.

Abstract

Locomotion in Stokes flow is an intensively-studied problem because it describes important biological phenomena such as the motility of many species' sperm, bacteria, algae and protozoa. Numerical computations can be challenging, particularly in three dimensions, due to the presence of moving boundaries and complex geometries; methods which combine ease-of-implementation and computational efficiency are therefore needed. A recently-proposed method to discretise the regularised Stokeslet boundary integral equation without the need for a connected 'mesh' is applied to the inertialess locomotion problem in Stokes flow. The mathematical formulation and key aspects of the computational implementation in MATLAB/GNU Octave are described, followed by numerical experiments with biflagellate algae and multiple uniflagellate sperm swimming between no-slip surfaces, for which both swimming trajectories and flow fields are calculated. These computational experiments required minutes of time on modest hardware; an extensible implementation is provided in a github repository. The nearest neighbour discretisation dramatically improves convergence and robustness, a key challenge in extending the regularised Stokeslet method to complicated, three dimensional, biological fluid problems.