Related papers: Crawling beneath the free surface: Water snail loc…
Real-life bacteria often swim in complex fluids, but our understanding of the interactions between bacteria and complex surroundings is still evolving. In this work, rod-like \textit{Bacillus subtilis} swims in a quasi-2D environment with…
Swelling is a volumetric-growth process in which a porous material expands by spontaneous imbibition of additional pore fluid. Swelling is distinct from other growth processes in that it is inherently poromechanical: Local expansion of the…
Settlement of marine larvae on a substrate is a fundamental problem of marine life. The probability of settlement is one of the quantitative characteristic of the settlement process. The probability of larval contact with a substrate is the…
We present the modeling, design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired soft robot capable of crawling on surfaces by actively manipulating the frictional force between its body and the surface. Earthworms are segmented…
Turbulent flow over a surface with streamwise-elongated rough and smooth stripes is studied by means of direct numerical simulation (DNS) in a periodic plane open channel with fully resolved roughness. The goal is to understand how the mean…
We consider the sloshing problem for an incompressible, inviscid, irrotational fluid in an open container, including effects due to surface tension on the free surface. We restrict ourselves to a constant contact angle and seek…
Near-field hydrodynamic interactions between bacteria and no-slip solid surfaces are the main mechanism underlying surface entrapment of bacteria. In this study, we employ a chiral two-body model to simulate bacterial dynamics near the…
Copepods participate in large-scale diel vertical migrations (DVM) as primary consumers in marine ecosystems. Given that they are negatively buoyant, gravity facilitates their downward cruising but impedes their upward relocation. In…
We investigate theoretically the collective dynamics of soft active particles living in a viscous fluid. We focus on a minimal model for active but non-motile particles consisting of $N>1$ elastic dimers deformed by active stresses and…
We have developed a toy model of flying snake's glide [J.J. Socha, Nature vol. 418 (2002) 603.] by modifying a model for a falling paper. We have found that asymmetric oscillation is a key about why snake can glide. Further investigation…
Fluid-based locomotion at low Reynolds number is subject to the constraints of the scallop theorem, which dictate that body kinematics identical under a time-reversal symmetry (in particular, those with a single degree of freedom) cannot…
The leaves of many plants are superhydrophobic, a property that may have evolved to clean the leaves by encouraging water droplets to bead up and roll off. Superhydrophobic surfaces can also exhibit reduced friction and liquids flowing over…
We demonstrate spontaneous wrinkling as a transient dynamical pattern in thin freely floating smectic liquid-crystalline films. The peculiarity of such films is that, while flowing liquid-like in the film plane, they cannot quickly expand…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
We present a numerical study of a thin elastic sheet with small extensibility freely sedimenting in a viscous fluid. Two scenarios are investigated: sedimentation in free space and near an infinite wall, where the wall may be vertical or…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
A mathematical model is proposed for shape evolution and locomotion of fish epidermal keratocytes on elastic substrates. The model is based on mechanosensing concepts: cells apply contractile forces onto the elastic substrate, while cell…
The inclination angle of the undrained shear slip surface in saturated soils is analyzed based on mixture theory. First, starting from the property that the bulk strain of soil skeleton is equal to the flow ratio of water discharged from…
We present the results of an experimental investigation into buoyant rigid spheres rising through highly concentrated collections of hydrated hydrogel particles. The volume fraction of particles is such that the mechanical properties of the…
Fluidisation is the process by which the weight of a bed of particles is supported by a gas flow passing through it from below. When fluidised materials flow down an incline, the dynamics of the motion differ from their non-fluidised…