Dancing fibres in a microscale Burgers-like vortex

An important category of microscale fluid–structure interactions concerns how flexible fibres deform and interact with flows. Many experimental and numerical studies have focused on the shape dynamics of fibres in linear shear flows. Here, instead, we consider a fully three-dimensional background flow with non-constant vorticity and study the shape evolution of fibres in a zero-Reynolds-number analogue of a Burgers vortex. This flow is created by the superposition of regularised singularities of