Hydrophobicity influence on swimming performance of magnetically driven miniature helical swimmers

Abstract

Helical microswimmers have been involved in a wide variety of applications, ranging from in vivo tasks such as targeted drug delivery to in vitro tasks such as transporting micro objects. Over the past decades, a number of studies have been established on the swimming performance of helical microswimmers and geometrical factors influencing their swimming performance. However, limited studies have focused on the influence of the hydrophobicity of swimmers' surface on their swimming performance. In this paper, we first demonstrated through theoretical analysis that the hydrophobicity of swimmer's surface material of the swimmer does affect its swimming performance: the swimmer with more hydrophobic surface is exerted less friction drag torque, and should therefore exhibit a higher step-out frequency, indicating that the swimmer with more hydrophobic surface should have better swimming performance. Then a series of experiments were conducted to verify the theoretical analysis. As a result, the main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that one potential approach to improve the helical microswimmers' swimming performance could be making its surface more hydrophobic.