Immersed Boundary Simulations of Deformable Swimmers
Snapshots at six points in time of a microorganism moving via amoeboid motion, simulated using the immersed boundary method.Historically, numerical simulations of swimming microorganisms have been done in 2D with simplified models owing to the difficulty of resolving the complex three-dimensional transient motion of these organisms. Here, we use the immersed boundary method to perform the first fully-resolved 3D simulations of microswimmers and importantly, we show that in viscoelastic fluids the predictions of 2D and 3D models can differ quite substantially.
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