Slender chemically-active artificial microswimmers #

Matthew Butler, Panayiota Katsamba, Lyndon Koens, Tom Montenegro-Johnson

13:30 Tuesday in 2Q48.

Part of the Self-propulsion and fluid-body interactions session.

Abstract #

Chemically active filaments are an exciting new category of artificial microswimmer. They self-propel due to chemical interactions between their surface and a surrounding solute. Surface chemical reactions locally generate or deplete the solute, and the resulting solute concentration gradients induce a slip flows that can move the swimmer through the surrounding fluid. The ensuing swimming motion depends on both the swimmer geometry and the chemical patterning across its surface. Previous work derived a Slender Phoretic Theory for the dynamics of chemically-active filaments. This asymptotically simplifies the solute problem for slender filaments to calculating line integrals along the filament’s centreline. In this talk, I will present recent work to extend the framework to include looped geometries and expand the library of analytical solutions. These results are a key step forward in probing the interplay of activity patterning and shape in these artificial microswimmers.