Design and analysis of a novel magnetic helical swimmer

Abstract

Magnetic helical swimmers are one type of robots that swim at low Reynolds number environments by rotating around the helix axis. Considering the importance and dramatic increase in the use of robots and microrobots in the near future, optimizing and increasing their efficiency is very important and noteworthy. Propulsion force and translational velocity are among the most important features of the magnetic helical swimmer, which improves the function of the swimmer as each of them increases. In this paper, a new design has been proposed for the magnetic helical swimmer by changing the geometry of the tail region, which has increased the propulsion force and improved its translational velocity. A suitable experimental setup has been designed and built in accordance with the required experiments to evaluate the translational velocity of the proposed swimmer. Using the experimental results, two models have been presented to express the translational velocity and propulsion force of the swimmer in terms of its angular velocity. The results of the experiments show that the propulsion force of the built swimmer is 698.89 % higher than that of the common magnetic helical swimmer with similar dimensions and the same environmental conditions in Newtonian fluid. At the end of the experiments, the motion of the proposed swimmer is simulated in the COMSOL software, and the results of the experiments are used to validate the simulation results. Finally, the effect of parameters such as the helix pitch and the number of turns of the helix on the translational velocity of the swimmer is investigated using the computer simulations.