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Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…
Exploiting the "natural" frame of space curves, we formulate an intrinsic dynamics of twisted elastic filaments in viscous fluids. A pair of coupled nonlinear equations describing the temporal evolution of the filament's complex curvature…
A particle-water discrete element based approach to describe water movement in partially saturated granular media is presented and tested. Water potential is governed by both capillary bridges, dominant at low saturations, and the pressure…
This expository review is devoted to fish swimming and bird/insect flight. (i) The simple waving motion of an elongated flexible ribbon plate of constant width, immersed in a fluid at rest, propagating a wave distally down the plate to swim…
Many multiphase fluid systems, such as those involving immiscible polymers or liquid-liquid systems with surfactants, have shown a breakdown of the no-slip condition at the material interface. This results in systems where the tangential…
We analyze a trapping reaction with a single penetrable trap, in a one dimensional lattice, where both species (particles and trap) are mobile and have a drift velocity. We obtain the density as seen from a reference system attached to the…
The effects of fluid viscosity on the kinematics of a small swimmer at low Reynolds number are investigated in both experiments and in a simple model. The swimmer is the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which is an undulating roundworm…
Plants create sugar in the mesophyll cells of their leaves by photosynthesis. This sugar, mostly sucrose, has to be loaded via the bundle sheath into the phloem vascular system (the sieve elements), where it is distributed to growing parts…
The self-assembly of photonic nanostructures in insects involves chitin, proteins, and lipids. While synthetic photonic systems have been extensively studied, current lipid-based self-assembly systems are limited in periodicity to…
Microscale hydrogels comprised of macromolecular networks have increasingly been used for applications involving cell encapsulation, tissue engineering and for the storage and release of active cargo molecules. However, the majority of such…
Thixotropic yields stress fluids are complex materials such as paint, drilling mud, and food products like ketchup or yogurt. They behave as a solid below a certain shear stress (called yield stress), and flows as a liquid above it. The…
The mechanical properties of polymer gels based on cytoskeleton proteins (e.g. actin) have been studied extensively due to their significant role in biological cell motility and in maintaining the cell's structural integrity. Microrheology…
The main goal of this work is to clarify and quantify, by means of mathematical analysis, the role of structural viscoelasticity in the biomechanical response of deformable porous media with incompressible constituents to sudden changes in…
We experimentally study the nonlinear fluid damping of a rigid but elastically mounted pitching wing in the absence of a freestream flow. The dynamics of the elastic mount are simulated using a cyber-physical system. We perturb the wing and…
We present a model to study the non-steady V-shaped peeling of a viscoelastic thin tape adhering to a rigid flat substrate. Geometry evolution and viscoelastic creep in the tape are the main features involved in the process, which allows to…
We prove the existence of large-data global-in-time weak solutions to an evolutionary PDE system describing flows of incompressible \emph{heat-conducting} viscoelastic rate-type fluids with stress-diffusion, subject to a stick-slip boundary…
Motility is a fundamental feature of living matter, encompassing single cells and collective behavior. Such living systems are characterized by non-conservativity of energy and a large diversity of spatio-temporal patterns. Thus,…
We present a hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian method for the direct simulation of three-dimensional, heterogeneous structures made of soft fibers and immersed in incompressible viscous fluids. Fiber-based organization of matter is pervasive in…
Motivated by the swimming of sperm in the non-Newtonian fluids of the female mammalian reproductive tract, we examine the swimming of filaments in the nonlinear viscoelastic Upper Convected Maxwell model. We obtain the swimming velocity and…
Parallel assemblies of slender structures forming brushes are common in our daily life from sweepers to pastry brushes and paintbrushes. This type of porous objects can easily trap liquid in their interstices when removed from a liquid…