Stirring by anisotropic squirming

Abstract

We consider a fluid stirred by the locomotions of squirmers through it and generalize the stochastic hydrodynamic model proposed by Thiffeault and Childress, Phys. Lett. A (2010) and Lin et al., J. Fluid Mech. (2011) to the case in which the swimmers move in anisotropically random directions. A non-diagonal effective diffusivity tensor is derived with which the diffusive preference of a passive particle along any given direction can be computed to provide more details of the phenomena beyond scalar statistics. We further identify a fraction from the orthogonal decomposition of the drift-induced particle displacement to distinguish the underlying nonlinear mixing mechanism for different types of swimmers. Numerical simulations verify the analytical results with explicit examples of prescribed, anisotropic stirring motions. We also connect our formulation to several measures used in clinical medical research such as diffusion tensor imaging where anisotropic diffusion has a significant consequence.

Keywords

• Mixing and transport
• Passive scalar
• Anisotropic diffusion