Optimising chiral structures for micro-scale propulsion

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• Eric Keavney (Imperial College)
• Monday 11 November 2013, 14:00-15:00
• Arts Lecture Room 4.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Alexandra Tzella.

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%.

This talk is part of the Applied Mathematics Seminar Series series.

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• Applied Mathematics Seminar Series
• Arts Lecture Room 4
• School of Mathematics events

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