Related papers: Microscale swimming: The molecular dynamics approa…
Despite their importance in many biological, ecological and physical processes, microorganismal fluid flows under tight confinement have not been investigated experimentally. Strong screening of Stokelets in this geometry suggests that the…
Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…
We address the problem of controlling a dynamical system governing the motion of a 3D weighted shape changing body swimming in a perfect fluid. The rigid displacement of the swimmer results from the exchange of momentum between prescribed…
There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…
Emergent phenomena share the fascinating property of not being obvious consequences of the design of the system in which they appear. This characteristic is no less relevant when attempting to simulate such phenomena, given that the outcome…
The fluid-mechanics community is currently divided in assessing the boundaries of applicability of the macroscopic approach to fluid mechanical problems. Can the dynamics of nano-droplets be described by the same macroscopic equations as…
In conventional fluid mechanics, the chemical composition and thermodynamic state of a fluid-solid interface are not considered when establishing velocity-field boundary conditions. As a consequence, fluid simulations are usually not able…
It has long been known that some microswimmers seem to swim counter-intuitively faster when the viscosity of the surrounding fluid is increased, whereas others slow down. This conflicting dependence of the swimming velocity on the viscosity…
Contrasting the well explored problem on how to steer a macroscopic agent like an airplane or a moon lander to optimally reach a target, "optimal microswimming", i.e. the quest for the optimal navigation strategy for microswimmers, remains…
The connection between swimming and control theory is attracting increasing attention in the recent literature. Starting from an idea of Alberto Bressan [7] we study the system of a planar body whose position and shape are described by a…
A theory is presented for wave-driven propulsion of floating bodies driven into oscillation at the fluid interface. By coupling the equations of motion of the body to a quasi-potential flow model of the fluid, we derive expressions for the…
We study the energetic efficiency of navigating microswimmers by explicitly taking into account the geometry of their body. We show that, as their shape transitions from prolate to oblate, non-steering microswimmers rotated by flow…
Hot microswimmers are self-propelled Brownian particles that exploit local heating for their directed self-thermophoretic motion. We provide a pedagogical overview of the key physical mechanisms underlying this promising new technology. It…
Much of our mechanistic understanding of the functions of biological macromolecules is based on static structural experiments, which can be modelled either as single structures or conformational ensembles. While these provide us with…
We introduce and investigate the wellposedness of two models describing the self-propelled motion of a "small bio-mimetic swimmer" in the 2D and 3D incompressible fluids modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations. It is assumed that the…
In two papers we proposed a continuum model for the dynamics of systems of self propelling particles with kinematic constraints on the velocities and discussed some of its properties. The model aims to be analogous to a discrete algorithm…
The current work studies the dynamics of a microswimmer in pressure-driven flow of a weakly viscoelastic fluid. Employing the second-order fluid model, we show that the self-propelling swimmer experiences a viscoelastic swimming lift in…
Computational chemistry allows researchers to experiment in sillico: by running a computer simulations of a biological or chemical processes of interest. Molecular dynamics with molecular mechanics model of interactions simulates N-body…
Nanoswimmers are ubiquitous in bio- and nano-technology but are extremely challenging to measure due to their minute size and driving forces. A simple method is proposed for detecting the elusive physical features of nanoswimmers by…
Physics governing the locomotion of microorganisms and other microsystems is dominated by viscous damping. An effective swimming strategy involves the non-reciprocal and periodic deformations of the considered body. Here, we show that a…