Cilia are common small scale biological entities who play fundamental purposes in living organisms. In many examples, cilia are very small, with physical scales of 200 nanometers in cross sectional diameter, and 10 microns in length. Recent advances in nanotechnology (see Nanoscale lab) have made it possible to begin to probe externally controlled synthetic and real cilia in fluid systems. The complete interpretation of control and ensuing measurements requires many observables not easily obtained, most notably 3 dimensional dynamic measurements. For this reason, we have designed mathematically exact and asymptotic solutions of the Stoke's equations for a variety of simple geometries, and have built a table top version of the microscopic experiments to obtain to validate the theory for interpretation of less controllable and challenging nanoscale measurements. Presently, the experiment is running in the Computer Science department through generous space, technical, and scientific assistance of Leandra Vicci, and the MSL laboratory.
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