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Active Stokesian dynamics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2022

Gwynn J. Elfring*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Applied Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada
John F. Brady*
Affiliation:
Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
*
†Email addresses for correspondence: gelfring@mech.ubc.ca, jfbrady@caltech.edu
†Email addresses for correspondence: gelfring@mech.ubc.ca, jfbrady@caltech.edu

Abstract

Since its development, Stokesian dynamics has been a leading approach for the dynamic simulation of suspensions of particles at arbitrary concentrations with full hydrodynamic interactions. Although developed originally for the simulation of passive particle suspensions, the Stokesian dynamics framework is equally well suited to the analysis and dynamic simulation of suspensions of active particles, as we elucidate here. We show how the reciprocal theorem can be used to formulate the exact dynamics for a suspension of arbitrary active particles, and then show how the Stokesian dynamics method provides a rigorous way to approximate and compute the dynamics of dense active suspensions where many-body hydrodynamic interactions are important.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Schematic of a deforming active particle.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Trajectory of a (pusher) active particle (labelled $\mathcal {B}_1$) in the presence of a passive particle (labelled $\mathcal {B}_2$).

Figure 2

Figure 3. An illustration of dynamics mediated by hydrodynamic interactions between immotile active particles (shakers). (a) 512 shaker particles are initially randomly oriented on a cubic lattice. Hydrodynamic interactions alone drive particle dynamics and mixing (b,c). Images are snapshots in time from left to right.

Figure 3

Figure 4. (a) Schematic of a reciprocal dumbbell swimmer. (b) Schematic of a dumbbell squirmer swimmer.

Figure 4

Figure 5. Simulation of a suspension of 4000 identical active particles using the fast Stokesian dynamics method (warmer colours indicate faster speeds).