Chemically active filaments: analysis and extensions of slender phoretic theory

Abstract

Autophoretic microswimmers self-propel via surface interactions with a surrounding solute fuel. Chemically-active filaments are an exciting new microswimmer design that augments traditional autophoretic microswimmers, such as spherical Janus particles, with extra functionality inherent to their slender filament geometry. Slender Phoretic Theory (SPT) was developed by Katsamba et al. to analyse the dynamics of chemically-active filaments with arbitrary three-dimensional shape and chemical patterning. SPT provides a line integral solution for the solute concentration field and slip velocity on the filament surface. In this work, we exploit the generality of SPT to calculate a number of new, non-trivial analytical solutions for slender autophoretic microswimmers, including a general series solution for phoretic filaments with arbitrary geometry and surface chemistry, a universal solution for filaments with a straight centreline, and explicit solutions for some canonical shapes useful for practical applications and benchmarking numerical code. Many common autophoretic particle designs include discrete jumps in surface chemistry; here we extend our SPT to handle such discontinuities, showing that they are regularised by a boundary layer around the jump. Since our underlying framework is linear, combinations of our results provide a library of analytic solutions that will allow researchers to probe the interplay of activity patterning and shape.