Spectral analysis for elastica 3-dimensional dynamics in a shear flow

Lujia Liu, Pawel Sznajder, Maria L. Ekiel-Jezewska

Published 2023-07-13Version 1

We present the spectral analysis of three-dimensional dynamics of an elastic filament in a shear flow of a viscous fluid at a low Reynolds number in the absence of Brownian motion. The elastica model is used. The fiber initially is almost straight at an arbitrary orientation, with small perpendicular perturbations in the shear plane and out-of-plane. To analyze the stability of both perturbations, equations for the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions are derived and solved by the Chebyshev spectral collocation method. It is shown that their crucial features are the same as in the case of the two-dimensional elastica dynamics in shear flow [Becker and Shelley, Phys. Rev. Lett. 2001] and the three-dimensional elastica dynamics in the compressional flow [Chakrabarti et al., Nat. Phys., 2020]. We find a similar dependence of the buckled shapes on the ratio of bending to hydrodynamic forces as in the simulations for elastic fibers of a nonzero thickness [Slowicka et al., New J. Phys., 2022].