Sperm Motility and Multiciliary Beating: An Integrative Mechanical Model

The motility of sperm flagella and cilia are based on a common axonemal structure. In this article, we describe a fluid-mechanical model for the ciliary and sperm axoneme. This fluid-mechanical model, based on the immersed boundary method, couples the internal force generation of dynein molecular motors through the passive elastic axonemal structure with the external fluid mechanics governed by the Navier-Stokes equations. We show recent numerical simulation results for sperm motility and multiciliary interaction.