Inertial self-propulsion of spherical microswimmers by rotation-translation coupling

Abstract: We study swimming of small spherical particles who regulate fluid flow on their surface by applying tangential squirming strokes. We derive translational and rotational velocities for any given stroke which is not restricted by axial symmetry as assumed usually. The formulation includes inertia of both the fluid and the swimmer, motivated by inertia's relevance for large Volvox colonies. We show that inertial contribution to mean speed comes from dynamic coupling between translation and rotation, which occurs only for strokes that break axial symmetry. Remarkably, this effect enables overcoming the scallop theorem on impossibility of propulsion by time-reversible stroke. We study examples of tangential strokes of axisymmetric travelling wave, and of asymmetric time-reversible flapping. In the latter case, we find that inertia-driven mean speed is optimized for flapping frequency and swimmer's size which fall well within the range of realistic physical values for Volvox colonies. We conjecture that similarly to Paramecium, large Volvox could use time-reversible strokes for inertia-driven swimming coupled with their rotations.