Related papers: Motion-reversal in a simple microscopic swimmer
We experimentally study a scallop-like swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings in a nearly frictionless, cohesive granular medium consisting of hydrogel spheres. Significant locomotion is found when the swimmer's flapping frequency matches…
Synthetic microswimmers mimicking biological movements at the microscale have been developed in recent years. Actuating helical magnetic materials with a homogeneous rotating magnetic field is one of the most widespread techniques for…
The dynamics of a triangular magnetocapillary swimmer is studied using the lattice Boltzmann method. Performing extensive numerical simulations taking into account the coupled dynamics of the fluid-fluid interface and of magnetic particles…
In this manuscript we describe the realization of a minimal hybrid microswimmer, composed of a ferromagnetic nanorod and a paramagnetic microsphere. The unbounded pair is propelled in water upon application of a swinging magnetic field that…
When swimming at low Reynolds numbers, inertial effects are negligible and reciprocal movements cannot induce net motion. Instead, symmetry breaking is necessary to achieve net propulsion. Directed swimming can be supported by magnetic…
The non-equilibrium structural and dynamical properties of a semiflexible polymer confined in a cylindrical microchannel and exposed to a Poiseuille flow is studied by mesoscale hydrodynamic simulations. For a polymer with a length half of…
This paper focuses on the mechanism of propulsion of a Purcell swimmer whose segments are magnetized and react to an external magnetic field applied into the fluid. By an asymptotic analysis, we prove that it is possible to steer the…
We present a detailed numerical study of a microscopic artificial swimmer realized recently by Dreyfus et al. in experiments [R. Dreyfus et al., Nature 437, 862 (2005)]. It consists of an elastic filament composed of superparamagnetic…
Guiding active microswimmers by external fields to requested target locations is a promising strategy to realize complex transport on the microscale. To this end, one possibility consists of attaching the microswimmers to orientable passive…
The motion of submerged magnetic microspheres rolling at a glass-water interface has been studied using magnetic rotation and optical tweezers combined with bright-field microscopy particle tracking techniques. Individual microspheres of…
A system of ferromagnetic particles trapped at a liquid-liquid interface and subjected to a set of magnetic fields (magnetocapillary swimmers) is studied numerically using a hybrid method combining the pseudopotential lattice Boltzmann…
We investigate a self-organized swimmer at low Reynolds numbers. The microscopic swimmer is composed of three spheres that are connected by two identical active linker arms. Each linker arm contains molecular motors and elastic elements and…
We report on dynamic properties of a simple model microswimmer composed of three spheres and propelling itself in a viscous fluid by spinning motion of the spheres under zero net torque constraint. At a fixed temperature and increasing the…
- In this paper, we focus on a variant of a 3-link magnetic microswimmer which consists of three rigid magnetized segments connected by two torsional springs. In particular, we assume that one of the springs is twisted so that the swimmer…
Microswimming cells and robots exhibit diverse behaviours due to both their swimming and their environment. One of the core environmental features impacting inertialess swimming is background flows. While the influence of select flows,…
Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…
We suggest several reciprocal swimming mechanisms that lead to a locomotion only in viscoelastic fluids. The first situation is to have a difference between the two amplitudes of the oscillatory arm motion for a three-sphere microswimmer.…
Swimming in circles occurs in a variety of situations at low Reynolds number. Here we propose a simple model for a swimmer that undergoes circular motion, generalising the model of a linear swimmer proposed by Najafi and Golestanian (Phys.…
We study the orientational and translational dynamics of spherical microswimmers trapped at fluid interfaces, in terms of the force dipole and source dipole components of their flow field. Using numerical simulations and analytical…
We theoretically and computationally study the low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics of a linear active microswimmer surfing on a compressible thin fluid layer characterized by an odd viscosity. Since the underlying three-dimensional fluid is…