Abstract
Locomotion of micron-size body in a fluid medium comes under the low Reynolds number (Re) fluid–structure interaction dynamics. The studies of biological and artificial microswimmers have paved the way for the research and development of clinical microrobots for biomedical applications. The paper presents a modeling and analysis of swimming of two multilink microrobots, where each robot is composed of a rigid spherical magnetic head attached to a rigid slender tail via a torsional spring. The microrobots are modeled in presence of both the intra- and inter-hydrodynamic coupling using the finite element method in COMSOL. The effect of hydrodynamic coupling is analyzed for two types of swimming mode: side-by-side and front-and-back configurations. The performances of microrobots are compared for the two modes of swimming and with that of an isolated microrobot. The hydrodynamic coupling is found to affect the performances of the robots and the maneuvering of collective performance depends on the swimming mode and actuation frequency.
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Acknowledgements
The author Sharanya S. is thankful to the Ministry of Education (MoE) for awarding HTRA fellowship (NIT Trichy) for pursuing this study.
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Sharanya, S., Singh, T.S. (2022). Hydrodynamic Coupling Between Comoving Microrobots. In: Das, B., Patgiri, R., Bandyopadhyay, S., Balas, V.E. (eds) Modeling, Simulation and Optimization. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 292. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0836-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0836-1_6
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