A boundary element regularized Stokeslet method applied to cilia- and flagella-driven flow

Abstract

A boundary element implementation of the regularized Stokeslet method of Cortez is applied to cilia and flagella-driven flows in biology. Previously published approaches implicitly combine the force discretization and the numerical quadrature used to evaluate boundary integrals. By contrast, a boundary element method can be implemented by discretizing the force using basis functions, and calculating integrals using accurate numerical or analytic integration. This substantially weakens the coupling of the mesh size for the force and the regularization parameter, and greatly reduces the number of degrees of freedom required. When modelling a cilium or flagellum as a one-dimensional filament, the regularization parameter can be considered a proxy for the body radius, as opposed to being a parameter used to minimize numerical errors. Modelling a patch of cilia, it is found that: (i) for a fixed number of cilia, reducing cilia spacing reduces transport, (ii) for fixed patch dimension, increasing cilia number increases the transport, up to a plateau at 9×9 cilia. Modelling a choanoflagellate cell, it is found that the presence of a lorica structure significantly affects transport and flow outside the lorica, but does not significantly alter the force experienced by the flagellum.