Influence of geometry on swimming performance of helical swimmers using DoE

Helical microswimmers capable of propulsion at low Reynolds numbers have been proposed for numerous applications, ranging from in vitro tasks on lab-on-a-chip to in vivo applications for minimally invasive medicine. Several magnetically actuated helical swimmers with different geometry parameters have been proposed in prior works. However, the influence of the geometrical parameters on their swimming performance has not been clearly studied. In this paper, we propose a dimensionless study on the geometrical parameters using Design of Experiments (DoE), in order to find the influential geometrical parameters on the swimming performance. We found that the most influential geometrical parameter on the swimming performance is the pitch of the helix. A helical swimmer with longer pitch shows better swimming performance in our testing range. The effects of the factors obtained by the experiments are also compared to the effects estimated by the theoretical sensitivity analysis.