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Biological and artificial microswimmers often have to propel through avariety of environments, ranging from heterogeneous suspending media to stronggeometrical confinement. Under confinement, local flow fields generated bymicroswimmers, and steric and hydrodynamic interactions with their environmentdetermine the locomotion. We propose a squirmer-like model to describe themotion of microswimmers in cylindrical microchannels, where propulsion isgenerated by a fixed surface slip velocity. The model is studied analyticallyfor cylindrical swimmer shapes, and by numerical hydrodynamics simulations forspherical and spheroidal shapes. For the numerical simulations, we employ thedissipative particle dynamics method for modelling fluid flow. Both theanalytical model and simulations show that the propulsion force increases withincreasing confinement. However, the swimming velocity under confinementremains lower than the swimmer speed without confinement for all investigatedconditions. In simulations, different swimming modes (i.e. pusher, neutral,puller) are investigated, and found to play a significant role in thegeneration of propulsion force when a swimmer approaches a dead end of acapillary. Propulsion generation in confined systems is local, such that thegenerated flow field generally vanishes beyond the characteristic size of theswimmer. These results contribute to a better understanding of microswimmerforce generation and propulsion under strong confinement, including the motionin porous media and in narrow channels.

Motion of microswimmers in cylindrical microchannels