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Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. There are similarly a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate, to using…

The motion of flexible fibers through structured fluidic environments is ubiquitous in nature and industrial applications. Most often, their dynamics results from the complex interplay between internal elastic stresses, contact forces and…

Shallow water and coastal aquatic ecosystems such as coral reefs and seagrass meadows play a critical role in regulating and understanding Earth's changing climate and biodiversity. They also play an important role in protecting towns and…

The drag anisotropy of slender filaments is a critical physical property allowing swimming in low-Reynolds number flows, and without it linear translation is impossible. Here we show that, in contrast, net rotation can occur under isotropic…

We suggest a scalar model for deformation and flow of an amorphous material such as a foam or an emulsion. To describe elastic, plastic and viscous behaviours, we use three scalar variables: elastic deformation, plastic deformation rate and…

Fish swim by undulating their bodies. These propulsive motions require coordinated shape changes of a body that interacts with its fluid environment, but the specific shape coordination that leads to robust turning and swimming motions…

Competition between biological species in marine environments is affected by the motion of the surrounding fluid. An effective 2D compressibility can arise, for example, from the convergence and divergence of water masses at the depth at…

Small flexible fibers in a turbulent flow are found to be most of the time as straight as stiff rods. This is due to the cooperative action of flexural rigidity and fluid stretching. However, fibers might bend and buckle when they tumble…

The interplay of inertia and elasticity is shown to have a significant impact on the transport of filamentary objects, modelled by bead-spring chains, in a two-dimensional turbulent flow. We show how elastic interactions amongst inertial…

Drainage, in which a nonwetting fluid displaces a wetting fluid from a porous medium, is well-studied for media with unchanging solid surfaces. However, many media can be eroded by drainage, with eroded material redeposited in pores…

Scaling laws for the propulsive performance of rigid foils undergoing oscillatory heaving and pitching motions are presented. Water tunnel experiments on a nominally two-dimensional flow validate the scaling laws, with the scaled data for…

The move to high performance applications greatly increases the demand to produce large instantaneous fluid forces for high-speed maneuvering and improved power efficiency for sustained propulsion. Animals achieve remarkable feats of…

It is well known that jammed soft materials will flow if sheared above their yield stress - think mayonnaise spread on bread - but a complete microscopic description of this seemingly sim- ple process has yet to emerge. What remains elusive…

We first summarize briefly several properties concerning the dynamics of two-dimensional (2D) turbulence, with an emphasis on the inverse cascade of energy to the largest accessible scale of the system. In order to study a similar…

Predicting the large-amplitude deformations of thin elastic sheets is difficult due to the complications of self-contact, geometric nonlinearities, and a multitude of low-lying energy states. We study a simple two-dimensional setting where…

The dynamics of fluid vesicles in simple shear flow is studied using mesoscale simulations of dynamically-triangulated surfaces, as well as a theoretical approach based on two variables, a shape parameter and the inclination angle, which…

In this work we investigate, by means of direct numerical simulations, how rotation affects the bi-dimensionalization of a turbulent flow. We study a thin layer of fluid, forced by a two-dimensional forcing, within the framework of the…

Consider the three-dimensional flow of a viscous Newtonian fluid upon an abitrarily curved substrate when the fluid film is thin as occurs in many draining, coating and biological flows. We derive a model of the dynamics of the film, the…

Soft and frangible materials that remodel under flow can give rise to branched patterns shaped by material properties, boundary conditions, and the time scales of forcing. We present a general theoretical framework for emergent branching in…

Turbulence has been recognized as a factor of paramount importance for the survival or extinction of sinking phytoplankton species. However, dealing with its multiscale nature in models of coupled fluid and biological dynamics is a…