Flow around an anchored soft hair.

The deformation dynamics of flexible microfibers are critical to many industrial and biological processes. The complex interaction between fluid and solid physics can create diverse non-linear behaviors. Such behaviors are at the heart of understanding plant and animal vasculatures characterized by deformable microchannels. Unraveling the poroelasticity of these structures is vital in designing bioinspired active and passive flow control devices. Inspired by these, in this talk, we explore the deformation mechanics of such microfibers in anchored configuration for flow-controlled systems at low Reynolds numbers. Our experiments highlight that confinement induces a strong coupling between fluid and solid physics. Further, such deformation response can be classified into regimes based on the Elastoviscous number for the system, which is obtained by developing a theoretical model based on the coupling of Euler-Bernoulli and Stokes equations.