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Main Authors: Yan, Mingjia, Warda, Mohamed, Németh, Balázs, Kikuchi, Lukas, Adhikari, Ronojoy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18097
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author Yan, Mingjia
Warda, Mohamed
Németh, Balázs
Kikuchi, Lukas
Adhikari, Ronojoy
author_facet Yan, Mingjia
Warda, Mohamed
Németh, Balázs
Kikuchi, Lukas
Adhikari, Ronojoy
contents Slender structures are ubiquitous in biological and physical systems, from bacterial flagella to soft robotic arms. The Cosserat rod provides a mathematical framework for slender bodies that can stretch, shear, twist and bend. In viscous fluid environments at low Reynolds numbers - as encountered in soft matter physics, biophysics, and soft continuum robotics - inertial effects become negligible, and hydrodynamic forces are well approximated by Stokes friction. We demonstrate that the resulting elastohydrodynamic equations of motion, when formulated using Cartan's method of moving frames, possess the structure of a geometric field theory in which the configuration field takes values in SE(3), the Lie group of rigid body motions. This geometric formulation yields coordinate-independent equations that are manifestly invariant under spatial isometries and naturally suited to constitutive modeling based on Curie's principle. We derive integrability conditions that determine when constitutive laws can be derived from an energy functional, thereby distinguishing between passive and active material responses. We also obtain the beam limit for small deformations. Our results establish a unified geometric framework for the nonlinear mechanics of slender structures in slow viscous flow and enable efficient numerical solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18097
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Geometric Field Theory for Elastohydrodynamics of Cosserat Rods
Yan, Mingjia
Warda, Mohamed
Németh, Balázs
Kikuchi, Lukas
Adhikari, Ronojoy
Soft Condensed Matter
Mathematical Physics
Slender structures are ubiquitous in biological and physical systems, from bacterial flagella to soft robotic arms. The Cosserat rod provides a mathematical framework for slender bodies that can stretch, shear, twist and bend. In viscous fluid environments at low Reynolds numbers - as encountered in soft matter physics, biophysics, and soft continuum robotics - inertial effects become negligible, and hydrodynamic forces are well approximated by Stokes friction. We demonstrate that the resulting elastohydrodynamic equations of motion, when formulated using Cartan's method of moving frames, possess the structure of a geometric field theory in which the configuration field takes values in SE(3), the Lie group of rigid body motions. This geometric formulation yields coordinate-independent equations that are manifestly invariant under spatial isometries and naturally suited to constitutive modeling based on Curie's principle. We derive integrability conditions that determine when constitutive laws can be derived from an energy functional, thereby distinguishing between passive and active material responses. We also obtain the beam limit for small deformations. Our results establish a unified geometric framework for the nonlinear mechanics of slender structures in slow viscous flow and enable efficient numerical solutions.
title Geometric Field Theory for Elastohydrodynamics of Cosserat Rods
topic Soft Condensed Matter
Mathematical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18097