Abstract
Arrays of arthropod filiform hairs form highly sensitive mechanoreceptor systems capable of detecting minute air disturbances, and it is unclear to what extent individual hairs interact with one another within sensor arrays. We present a computational fluid dynamics model for one or more hairs, coupled to a rigid-body dynamics model, for simulating both biological (e.g., a cricket cercal hair) and artificial MEMS-based systems. The model is used to investigate hair–hair interaction between pairs of hairs and quantify the extent of so-called viscous coupling. The results show that the extent to which hairs are coupled depends on the mounting properties of the hairs and the frequency at which they are driven. In particular, it is shown that for equal length hairs, viscous coupling is suppressed when they are driven near the natural frequency of the undamped system and the dam** coefficient at the base is small. Further, for certain configurations, the motion of a hair can be enhanced by the presence of nearby hairs. The usefulness of the model in designing artificial systems is discussed.
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Notes
Simulating multiple hairs is presented below.
Other criteria are possible (velocity, for example), but these are reasonable choices given the focus of current literature.
Note that due to boundary layer effects caused by the oscillating flow over the flat substrate, the free-stream velocities are not identical in the simulated results.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Future and Emergent Technologies arm of the Information Society Technologies Programme, Sixth Framework Programme, IST-FETPI-016039. The authors would like to thank Gijs Krijnen and the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, Universiteit Twente, for providing specifications for MEMS-based hair sensors and Jérôme Casas of the Institut de Recherche sur la Biologie de l’Insecte, Université de Tours, for his insight and valuable input on early drafts of this paper.
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Lewin, G.C., Hallam, J. A computational fluid dynamics model of viscous coupling of hairs. J Comp Physiol A 196, 385–395 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-010-0524-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-010-0524-6