Flexible polymeric tail for micro robot drag reduction bioinspired by the nature microorganisms

Abstract

In nature, most microorganisms have flexible micro/nanostructure tails, which help them create propulsion, reduce drag, or search for food. Previous studies investigated these flexible structures mostly from the propulsion creation perspective. However, the drag reduction and the underlying physical mechanisms of such tails are less known. This scientific gap is more significant when multi-polymeric/hierarchical structures are used. To fill the gap, we use the dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) method as a powerful fluid–polymer interaction technique to study the flexible tails' influences on drag reduction. Note that the flow regime for these microorganisms is in the range of laminar low Reynolds number; hence, the effects of both pressure and viscous drag forces are crucial. On the other hand, in the DPD method, only the total drag force is obtained. Therefore, this paper first proposes a way to determine the contribution of viscous and pressure drags and then investigates their effects on the body of the micro-robot separately. As a bioinspired-templated micro-robot simulation, the flow over a circular cylinder with an attached flexible tail is investigated. The problem is carried out for the Reynolds numbers from 10 to 25 for different polymer lengths (single/multi) and hierarchical structure tails. Our results show that long polymer tails strongly affect pressure drag, such that the longer polymeric tails (single/multi), the more drag reduction, particularly the pressure drag. Moreover, the hierarchical structures (containing short and long tails) caused the total drag reduction mainly by decreasing the viscous drag rather than the pressure one.