Amoeboid propulsion of active solid bodies, vesicles and droplets: a comparison

TL;DR

This paper compares three types of near-spherical amoeboid microswimmers—solid bodies, vesicles, and droplets—using minimal models to analyze their swimming velocities, efficiencies, and optimal strokes through a unified mathematical approach.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework for comparing different microswimmer types and provides new results for vesicles and droplets, extending previous solid body models.

Findings

Droplets outperform vesicles and solids in swimming speed when each chooses its optimal stroke.

Droplets have higher maximum efficiency than vesicles when internal dissipation is low.

Solid bodies have significantly lower efficiency compared to vesicles and droplets.

Abstract

We present a unified discussion of three types of near-spherical amoeboid microswimmers, driven by periodic, axially symmetric, achiral deformations (swim strokes): a solid deformable body, a vesicle with incompressible fluid membrane, and a droplet. Minimal models are used, which characterize the swimmer type only by boundary conditions. We calculate the swimming velocities, the dissipated power and the Lighthill efficiencies within a second order perturbation expansion in the small deformation amplitudes. %Our approach uses spherical harmonics to represent surface deformations and a system of general solutions of the Stokes equation based on vector spherical harmonics. For solid bodies, we reproduce older results by Lighthill and Blake, for vesicles and for droplets we add new results. The unified approach allows for a detailed comparison between the three types of microswimmers. We present such comparisons for swim strokes made up of spherical harmonics of adjacent orders $l$ and $l+1$, as well as for a manifold of swim strokes, made up of spherical harmonics up to order $l=4$, which respect volume- and surface-incompressibility. This manifold is two-dimensional, which allows to present swimming velocities and efficiencies in a compact graphical form. In a race in which each swimmer can choose the stroke that maximizes its speed, the droplet always comes in first, the vesicle comes in second, while the particle finishes third. However, if the three swimmers perform the same stroke, other order of rankings become possible. The maximum of the total efficiency of a droplet is greater than that of a vesicle if the internal dissipation is small. The efficiency of the solid body turns out to be typically two orders of magnitude smaller than that of vesicles and droplets. Optimizing the Lighthill efficiency and optimizing the swimming velocity result in different optimal swim strokes