A magnetically driven elastic rod type bi-directional swimmer at stokes flow

Abstract

In this paper, a flexible rod type micro-swimmer is proposed which achieves swimming direction reversal on the fly by forming a chiral helix-like geometry through external magnetic excitation. Furthermore an accompanying low Reynolds number flow-structure interaction analysis framework is developed which effectively combines a geometrically non-linear shear deformable beam model with regularized Stokeslet method in a monolithic implicit solution algorithm. This framework is used to investigate the basic characteristics of the proposed micro-swimmer in terms of dimensionless groups reflecting the interplay between different forces involved.