The biological or medical related problems are among the most heated topics in scientific field. There is a rising interest in studying the behavior of microbes and their interactions with flow. In order to explore the velocity fields, pressures and forces around the microbes, the solution of Stokes equations, which is called a Stokeslet, are used. This solution represents the velocity field due to a concentrated external force acting on fluid at a single point. This singularity could cause the expression of velocity not integrable. We use the Regularized Stokeslet Method and Method of Images to deal with this problem. The expression of force is replaced by a radially symmetric function, which distributes the force on a certain area rather than at a single point. We perform different numerical simulations to validate the code against analytical solution for flow around a sphere and a swimmer. The numerical results match well with the exact solutions, except for the relatively large errors at the surfaces of the swimming microorganism. It can be concluded that the analytical solutions of microbes interacting with surfaces can be well simulated by introducing the method of Regularized Stokeslet.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Junyuan Li, Vaseem Shaik, Arezoo Ardekani (2017), "Analytical Solution of Microbes Interacting with Surfaces," https://nanohub.org/resources/26906.

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1. Method of Images
2. microbes
3. nanofluidics
4. NCN SURF
5. NCN URE
6. undergraduate research