Modeling Paramecium swimming in a capillary tube

In certain types of biomimetic surgery systems, micro robots inspired by Paramecium are designed to swim in a capillary tube for gaining access to internal organs with minimal invasion. Gaining insight into the mechanics of Paramecium swimming in a capillary tube is vital for optimizing the design of such systems. There are two approaches to modeling the physics of micro swimming. In the envelope approach, which is widely accepted by researchers, Paramecium is approximated as a sphere, self-propelled by tangential and normal surface distortions. However, not only is this approach incapable of considering the specic geometry of Paramecium, but it also neglects short range hydrodynamic interactions due to beating cilia, thus, leading to dissimilarity between experimental data and simulation results. The aim of this study is to present a sub layer approach to modeling Paramecium locomotion that is capable of directly applying hydrodynamic interactions due to beating cilia onto the Paramecium boundary. In this approach, the Paramecium boundary is discretized to hydrodynamically independent elements and, at each time step of swimming, a specic function is t to the Paramecium boundary. Then, element coordinates are extracted and uid dynamic equations are solved to model the physics of micro swimming.