Rapidly yawing spheroids in viscous shear flow: Emergent loss of symmetry

Abstract

We investigate the emergent three-dimensional (3D) dynamics of a rapidly yawing spheroidal swimmer interacting with a viscous shear flow. We show that the rapid yawing generates non-axisymmetric emergent effects, with the active swimmer behaving as an effective passive particle with two orthogonal planes of symmetry. We also demonstrate that this effective asymmetry generated by the rapid yawing can cause chaotic behaviour in the emergent dynamics, in stark contrast to the emergent dynamics generated by rapidly rotating spheroids, which are equivalent to those of effective passive spheroids. In general, we find that the shape of the equivalent effective particle under rapid yawing is different to the average shape of the active particle. Moreover, despite having two planes of symmetry, the equivalent passive particle is not an ellipsoid in general, except for specific scenarios in which the effective shape is a spheroid. In these scenarios, we calculate analytically the equivalent aspect ratio of the effective spheroid. We use a multiple scales analysis for systems to derive the emergent swimmer behaviour, which requires solving a nonautonomous nonlinear 3D dynamical system, and we validate our analysis via comparison to numerical simulations.