Mathematical Biology Seminar
Ondrej Maxian, University of Chicago,
Tueday, January 21, 2025
2:00pm in LCB 215
A simulation platform for inextensible filaments with Brownian motion and nonlocal hydrodynamics
Abstract: Semiflexible filaments are ubiquitous in biology, physics, and engineering. In cell biology, actin filaments provide a particularly challenging set of physical circumstances for simulation: they are slender, inextensible, interact hydrodynamically through a common background fluid, and are semiflexible, meaning that Brownian fluctuations cannot be neglected. In this talk, I will present a simulation platform for the simulation of large-scale filament suspensions that accounts for filament inextensibility and nonlocal hydrodynamics, while preserving fluctuation-dissipation balance. To do so, I will introduce a kinematic operator which confines the dynamics to inextensible motions, then define the mobility using line integrals of regularized singularities. I will show how to preserve the symmetric positive definite mobility by using a thicker regularization width for the nonlocal integrals than for the self-term, then conclude by demonstrating the widespread applicability of the software in applications ranging from cytoskeletal dynamics to fiber suspensions in gravity.
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