Mapping flagellated swimmers to surface-slip driven swimmers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to efficiently simulate flagellated microswimmers by mapping them to surface-slip driven models, maintaining accuracy while reducing computational costs.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel mapping technique that translates detailed flagellated swimmer dynamics into simplified slip-driven models with high precision.

Findings

The mapped slip-driven swimmers replicate the velocity of flagellated swimmers accurately.

Flow fields generated by the simplified models closely match those of detailed models.

The method is validated in various scenarios including boundary interactions and obstacle scattering.

Abstract

Flagellated microswimmers are ubiquitous in natural habitats. Understanding the hydrodynamic behavior of these cells is of paramount interest, owing to their applications in bio-medical engineering and disease spreading. Since the last two decades, computational efforts have been continuously improved to accurately capture the complex hydrodynamic behavior of these model systems. However, modeling the dynamics of such swimmers with fine details is computationally expensive due to the large number of unknowns and the small time-steps required to solve the equations. In this work we propose a method to map fully resolved flagellated microswimmers to coarse, active slip driven swimmers which can be simulated at a reduced computational cost. Using the new method, the slip driven swimmers move with the same velocity, to machine precision, as the flagellated swimmers and generate a similar flow field with a controlled accuracy. The method is validated for swimming patterns near a no-slip boundary, interactions between swimmers and scattering with large obstacles.