NUMERICAL STUDY OF THE MICROORGANISMS SWIMMING IN ANISOTROPIC VISCOELASTIC FLUIDS IN CHANNEL

Recently, microorganisms swimming in channel has gradually become one of the hot issues. The deep understanding of the microorganism swimming in complex fluids can provide guidance for the design and manufacture of micro-devices. There are complex behaviors when microorganisms swimming in channel and the hydrodynamic mechanism has not yet been clarified. In our work, immersed boundary method is adopted, and the Taylor’s swimming sheet model is introduced to investigate the swimming characteristics of micro-swimmer in anisotropic viscoelastic fluid in the channel. We focus on analyzing the effects of the wall on the micro-swimmer behaviors. Our results show that the micro-swimmer speeds up in channel, and it is significant when micro-swimmer close to the channel wall. In addition, the swimming efficiency in channel is greater than that of free swimming. We obverse that pressure plays a role in promoting the swimming of microorganisms and viscous force acts as a hindrance. Elastic force produced by the polymer is much smaller. The micro-swimmer gains greater pressure when swimming in channel, and we believe it is related to the acceleration phenomenon of microswimmer.