Swimming and peristaltic pumping between two plane parallel walls.

Swimming at low Reynolds number in a fluid confined between two plane walls is studied for an infinite plane sheet located midway between the walls and distorted with a transverse propagating wave. It is shown that the flow pattern is closely related to that for peristaltic pumping. The hydrodynamic interaction between two flexible sheets swimming parallel in infinite space is related to the problem of peristaltic pumping in a planar channel with two wavy walls.