NJIT Applied Mathematics Colloquium
Friday, September 30, 2011, 11:30am
Cullimore Lecture Hall II
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Waving rings and swimming in circles: some lessons learned through biofluiddynamics
Lisa Fauci
Tulane University
Dinoflagellates swim due to the action of two flagella - a trailing,
longitundinal flagellum that propagates planar waves, and a transverse
flagellum that propagates helical waves. Motivated by the
intriguing function of the transverse flagellum, we study the
fundamental fluid dynamics of a helically-undulating ring in a viscous
fluid. We contrast this biofluiddynamic study, where the
kinematics of the waveform are taken as given, with a model of
mammalian sperm hyperactivated motility. Here, our goal is to
examine how the complex interplay of fluid dynamics, biochemistry, and
elastic properties of the flagellum give rise to the swimming patterns
observed. We will discuss the method of regularized Stokeslets,
which is an easily-implemented and versatile computational method for
examining fluid-structure interactions in very viscous flows.
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