  We consider a low Reynolds number artificial swimmer that consists of an
active arm followed by $N$ passive springs separated by spheres. This setup
generalizes an approach proposed in Montino and DeSimone, Eur. Phys. J. E, vol.
38, 2015. We further study the limit as the number of springs tends to infinity
and the parameters are scaled conveniently, and provide a rigorous proof of the
convergence of the discrete model to the continuous one. Several numerical
experiments show the performances of the displacement in terms of the frequency
or the amplitude of the oscillation of the active arm.
