Microswimming with inertia

Microswimmers, especially in theoretical treatments, are generally taken to be completely inertia-free, since inertial effects on their motion are typically small and assuming their absence simplifies the problem considerably. Yet in nature there is no discrete break between swimmers for which inertia is negligibly small and for which it is detectable. Here we study a microswimming model for which the effect of inertia is calculated explicitly in the regime of transition between the Stokesian and the non-Stokesian flow limits, which we term the intermediate regime. The model in the inertialess limit is the bead-spring swimmer. We first show that in the intermediate regime a mechanical microswimmer exhibits damped inertial coasting like an underdamped harmonic oscillator. We then calculate analytically the swimmer’s velocity by including a mass-acceleration term in the equations of motion which are otherwise based on the Stokes flow. We show that this hybrid treatment combining aspects of underdamped and overdamped dynamics provides an accurate description of the motion in the intermediate regime, as verified here by comparison to simulations using the lattice Boltzmann method, and is a significant improvement over the results from the inertialess theory when either the mass of the swimmer or the forces driving its motion is/are large enough.