
Flexible filament in time–periodic viscous flow : shape chaos and period three
Vipin Agrawal1, 2 and Dhrubaditya Mitra1, ∗
1Nordita, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University,
12 Hannes Alfv´ens v¨ag 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
2Department of Physics, Stockholm university, Stockholm.
(Dated: October 11, 2022)
We study a single, freely–floating, inextensible, elastic filament in a linear shear flow: U0(x, y) =
˙γyˆx. In our model: the elastic energy depends only on bending; the rate–of–strain, ˙γ=Ssin(ωt) is
a periodic function of time, t; and the interaction between the filament and the flow is approximated
by a local isotropic drag force. Based on the shape of the filament we find five different dynamical
phases: straight, buckled, periodic (with period two, period three, period four, etc), chaotic and
one with chaotic transients. In the chaotic phase, we show that the iterative map for the angle,
which the end–to–end vector of the filament makes with the tangent its one end, has period three
solutions; hence it is chaotic. Furthermore, in the chaotic phase the flow is an efficient mixer.
Keywords: fluid-structure interactions, spatiotemporal chaos, periodic orbit theory
I. INTRODUCTION
The dynamics of flexible filaments in flows plays a cru-
cial role in many biological and industrial processes [1].
A canonical example is that of cilia and flagella [2, 3]
that takes part in wide variety of biological tasks, e.g.,
swimming of microorganisms, feeding and breathing of
marine invertebrates. In such cases, although the flow
nonlinearities can often be safely ignored, due to its elas-
tic nonlinearities and flow–structure interactions a single
isolated filament can show surprisingly complex dynam-
ics in flows. Both active and passive filament, anchored
or freely floating, in various steady flows have been stud-
ied extensively, see Ref. [4, 5] and references therein. In
steady flows, a single passive filament has quite complex
transient dynamics [6–14]. For active filaments, the focus
has been on how a periodic driving can give rise to sym-
metry breaking, e.g., swimming [15] or whirling [16–18].
This year, three papers have focussed on, how periodic
driving, either of the flow or the filament, can give rise
to secondary instabilities [19] or statistically stationary
state with chaotic/complex dynamics [20, 21]. For the
latter, the shape of the filament, as described by its cur-
vature as a function of its arc length, is a spatiotempo-
rally chaotic function. Henceforth we call this phenom-
ena shape chaos. Such chaotic solutions are particularly
interesting because they have the potential to be used to
generate efficient mixing in microfluidics.
Two effects determine the fate of an elastic filament
in flow. One is the elastic nonlinearity of the filament
and the other is the viscous interaction between the fil-
ament and the flow. The latter, in all its glory, gives
rise to non–local and nonlinear interaction between two
different parts of the same filament. Nevertheless, the-
oretical studies [16, 22–24] have often approximated the
viscous effect as a local, linear, isotropic drag. Can this
local approximation to the flow–structure interaction still
∗dhruba.mitra@gmail.com
FIG. 1. Sketch of our numerical experiment. Initially
the filament is straight and is aligned vertically. The back-
ground shear flow, Equation (1) is shown as arrow: t=T /4
(top panel) and t= 3T/4 (bottom panel).
capture the shape chaos of a freely-floating filament ? As
we show in the rest of this paper, the answer is yes; we
prove shape chaos using Sharkovskii and Li and Yorke’s
famous result [25] – existence of period orbits of period
three implies not only the existence of orbits of all periods
but also senstive dependence on initial condition.
In Figure. 1 we show a sketch of our numerical exper-
iment. Initially the filament is aligned vertically. The
background shear flow is given by
U0(x, y) = ˙γyˆx,and ˙γ=Ssin(ωt).(1)
Here T= 2π/ω is the time period of the periodic shear
arXiv:2210.04781v1 [cond-mat.soft] 10 Oct 2022