A note on the reciprocal theorem for the swimming of simple bodies

Abstract

The use of the reciprocal theorem has been shown to be a powerful tool to obtain the swimming velocity of bodies at low Reynolds number. The use of this method for lower-dimensional swimmers, such as cylinders and sheets, is more problematic because of the undefined or ill-posed resistance problems that arise in the rigid-body translation of these shapes. Here we show that this issue can be simply circumvented and give concise formulas obtained via the reciprocal theorem for the self-propelled motion of deforming two-dimensional bodies. We also discuss the connection between these formulae and Fax\'en's laws.