Meeting Abstract
Impedance pumping (or dynamic suction pumping) drives flow through a flexible valveless tube with a single region of actuation. This pumping mechanism has been proposed as the primary mechanism for inducing flow in the vertebrate embryonic tubular heart. It may also serve as a pumping mechanism in other valveless, flexible tubes such as the intestines, the bodies of swimming salps, and some tubular invertebrate hearts. It is a profoundly complex pumping mechanism given that the flow velocities and directions generated depend nonlinearly upon the driving frequency, material properties, duty factor, and location of the actuation point. We propose that dynamic suction pumping is an efficient mechanism for moving fluid when it is actuated at the tube’s natural frequency of vibration and when the tube is not critically damped. We use the immersed boundary method to solve the fully-coupled fluid structure interaction problem of pumping in a flexible tube with and without mass. We find that strong flows are produced when the tube is driven at one of its resonant frequencies and when it is not critically damped.
