Slender body theory facilitates computational simulations of thin fibers immersed in a viscous fluid by approximating each fiber using only the geometry of the fiber centerline curve and the line force density along it. However, it has been unclear how well slender body theory actually approximates Stokes flow about a thin but truly three-dimensional fiber, in part due to the fact that simply prescribing data along a 1D curve does not result in a well-posed boundary value problem for the Stokes equations in R 3 . Here, we introduce a PDE problem to which slender body theory (SBT) provides an approximation, thereby placing SBT on firm theoretical footing. The slender body PDE is a new type of boundary value problem for Stokes flow where partial Dirichlet and partial Neumann conditions are specified everywhere along the fiber surface. Given only a 1D force density along a closed fiber, we show that the flow field exterior to the thin fiber is uniquely determined by imposing a fiber integrity condition: the surface velocity field on the fiber must be constant along cross sections orthogonal to the fiber centerline. Furthermore, a careful estimation of the residual, together with stability estimates provided by the PDE well-posedness framework, allows us to establish error estimates between the slender body approximation and the exact solution to the above problem. The error is bounded by an expression proportional to the fiber radius (up to logarithmic corrections) under mild regularity assumptions on the 1D force density and fiber centerline geometry.

Slender body theory is a commonly used approximation in computational models of thin fibers in viscous fluids, especially in simulating the motion of cilia or flagella in swimming microorganisms. In [23], we developed a PDE framework for analyzing the error introduced by the slender body approximation for closed-loop fibers with constant radius , and showed that the difference between our closed-loop PDE solution and the slender body approximation is bounded by an expression proportional to | log |. Here we extend the slender body PDE framework to the free endpoint setting, which is more physically relevant from a modeling standpoint but more technically demanding than the closed loop analysis. The main new difficulties arising in the free endpoint setting are defining the endpoint geometry, identifying the extent of the 1D slender body force density, and determining how the well-posedness constants depend on the non-constant fiber radius. Given a slender fiber satisfying certain geometric constraints at the filament endpoints and a one-dimensional force density satisfying an endpoint decay condition, we show a bound for the difference between the solution to the slender body PDE and the slender body approximation in the free endpoint setting. The bound is a sum of the same | log | term appearing in the closed loop setting and an endpoint term proportional to , where is now the maximum fiber radius.Contents *

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We consider the mapping properties of the integral operator arising in nonlocal slender body theory (SBT) for the model geometry of a straight, periodic filament. It is well known that the classical singular SBT integral operator suffers from high wavenumber instabilities, making it unsuitable for approximating the slender body inverse problem, where the fiber velocity is prescribed and the integral operator must be inverted to find the force density along the fiber. Regularizations of the integral operator must therefore be used instead. Here, we consider two regularization methods: spectral truncation and the -regularization of Tornberg and Shelley (2004). We compare the mapping properties of these approximations to the underlying partial differential equation (PDE) solution, which for the inverse problem is simply the Stokes Dirichlet problem with data constrained to be constant on cross sections. For the straight-but-periodic fiber with constant radius > 0, we explicitly calculate the spectrum of the operator mapping fiber velocity to force for both the PDE and the approximations. We prove that the spectrum of the original SBT operator agrees closely with the PDE operator at low wavenumbers but differs at high frequencies, allowing us to define a truncated approximation with a wavenumber cutoff

We investigate the motion of a thin rigid body in Stokes flow and the corresponding slender body approximation used to model sedimenting fibers. In particular, we derive a rigorous error bound comparing a regularized version of the rigid slender body approximation to the classical PDE for rigid motion in the case of a closed loop with constant radius. Our main tool is the slender body PDE framework established by the authors and D. Spirn in [18,19], which we adapt to the rigid setting. *(1.2)Here e t (s) is the unit tangent vector to X(s) and R 0 (s, s ) = X(s) − X(s ). The slender body approximation generally allows for bending and flexing of the filament along its centerline and requires specifying the one-dimensional force density over the length of the fiber centerline. If the fiber is constrained to be fully rigid, only the total force F and torque T must be specified, where T f (s) ds = F , T X(s) × f (s) ds = T . (1.3)