Optimal Swimming at low Reynolds numbers
Abstract
We study the optimal strokes for swimming at low Reynolds numbers. We introduce a new a quantitative measure of swimming efficiency: the swimming drag coefficient. This notion is used to determine the optimal stroke for a soluble model of a swimmer in two dimensions, as well as to derive general scaling relations. For example, we show that the maximal speed of an externally powered swimmer scales with the square root of its linear scale.Keywords
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