Abstract
Mammalian sperm swim in fluids containing proteins and cellular debris that may increase resistance to flow. We explore how swimming speeds and trajectories of sperm with symmetric and asymmetric waveforms are affected by this enhanced resistance using a Brinkman model. The effective flow is determined using regularized fundamental solutions and we represent the flagellum as an elastic rod with forces from a preferred curvature model. For certain ranges of stiffness parameters, we can see an increase in swimming speed for the finite length swimmer with a symmetric waveform. The path curvature decreases for an asymmetric waveform as resistance increases.
