Taylor’s swimming sheet: Analysis and improvement of the perturbation series

In G.I. Taylor’s historic paper on swimming microorganisms, a two-dimensional sheet was proposed as a model for flagellated cells passing traveling waves as a means of locomotion. Using a perturbation series, Taylor computed swimming speeds up to fourth order in amplitude. Here we systematize the expansion so that it can be carried out formally to arbitrarily high order. The resultant series diverges for an order one value of the wave amplitude, but may be transformed into a series with much improved convergence properties and which yields results comparing favorably to those obtained numerically via a boundary integral method for moderate and large values of the wave amplitudes.