Breadcrumb
Optimising chiral structures for micro-scale propulsion
Thu 25 April 2013, 14:00
Eric Keaveny
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London
Organiser: Mark Woodhouse
ABSTRACT
In micron-scale hydrodynamics, shape and geometry play a strong role in determining the speed at which a body can move through fluid. This shape dependence is particularly important to the design of many microfluidic devices, including magnetically actuated micro-swimmers fabricated and studied for biomedical applications. In this talk, I will discuss several important, experimentally-realisable micro-structures whose shapes couple their rotations and translations. I will address the design of these devices by discretising an infinite-dimensional optimisation problem to obtain swimmer geometries that maximise speed for a given applied torque. Our optimisations show that attached payloads have a significant effect on optimal swimmer shapes and current designs can be improved by upwards of 450%.