| Title: |
Hydrodynamic interactions between a sedimenting squirmer and a planar wall |
| Authors: |
Shum, Henry; Palaniappan, D.; Young, Yuan-Nan |
| Contributors: |
National Science Foundation |
| Source: |
Journal of Fluid Mechanics ; volume 1010 ; ISSN 0022-1120 1469-7645 |
| Publisher Information: |
Cambridge University Press (CUP) |
| Publication Year: |
2025 |
| Description: |
The hydrodynamic interactions between a sedimenting microswimmer and a solid wall have ubiquitous biological and technological applications. A plethora of gravity-induced swimming dynamics near a planar no-slip wall provide a platform for designing artificial microswimmers that can generate directed propulsion through their translation–rotation coupling near a wall. In this work, we provide exact solutions for a squirmer (a model swimmer of spherical shape with a prescribed slip velocity) facing either towards or away from a planar wall perpendicular to gravity. These exact solutions are used to validate a numerical code based on the boundary integral method with an adaptive mesh for distances from the wall down to 0.1 % of the squirmer radius. This boundary integral code is then used to investigate the rich gravity-induced dynamics near a wall, mapping out the detailed bifurcation structures of the swimming dynamics in terms of orientation and distance to the wall. Simulation results show that a squirmer may traverse the wall, move to a fixed point at a given height with a fixed orientation in a monotonic way or in an oscillatory fashion, or oscillate in a limit cycle in the presence of wall repulsion. |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| Language: |
English |
| DOI: |
10.1017/jfm.2025.260 |
| Availability: |
https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2025.260; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022112025002605 |
| Rights: |
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.5D5041F5 |
| Database: |
BASE |