Regularized Stokeslet Surfaces

A variation of the Method of Regularized Stokeslets (MRS) in three dimensions is developed for triangulated surfaces with a piecewise linear force density. The work extends the regularized Stokeslet segment methodology used for piecewise linear curves. By using analytic integration of the regularized Stokeslet kernel over the triangles, the regularization parameter ϵ is effectively decoupled from the spatial discretization of the surface. This is in contrast to the usual implementation of the method in which the regularization parameter is chosen for accuracy reasons to be about the same size as the spatial discretization. The validity of the method is demonstrated through several examples, including the flow around a rigidly translating/rotating sphere and in the squirmer model for ciliate self-propulsion. Notably, second order convergence in the spatial discretization for fixed ϵ is demonstrated. Considerations of mesh design and choice of regularization parameter are discussed, and the performance of the method is compared with existing quadrature-based implementations.