Eur. Phys. J. E (2020) 43: 6
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2020-11932-5

Regular Article

Parking 3-sphere swimmer: II. The long-arm asymptotic regime

¹ CMAP, Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées École Polytechnique, Route de Saclay, 91128, Palaiseau Cedex, France
² Institute for Analysis and Scientific Computing, TU Wien, Wiedner Hauptstraße 8-10, 1040, Wien, Austria

^* e-mail: giovanni.difratta@asc.tuwien.ac.at

Received: 7 October 2019
Accepted: 22 January 2020
Published online: 4 February 2020

Abstract

The paper carries on our previous investigations on the complementary version of Purcell’s rotator (sPr ₃): a low-Reynolds-number swimmer composed of three balls of equal radii. In the asymptotic regime of very long arms, the Stokes-induced governing dynamics is derived, and then experimented in the context of energy-minimizing self-propulsion characterized in the first part of the paper.