Related papers: Magnetically-actuated artificial cilia for microfl…

Microfluidics involves the manipulation of flows at the microscale, typically requiring external power sources to generate pressure gradients. Alternatively, harnessing flows from active fluids, which are usually chaotic, has been proposed…

The paper deals with a theoretical investigation of the peristaltic transport of a physiological fluid in a porous asymmetric channel under the action of a magnetic field. The stream function, pressure gradient and axial velocity are…

We consider a finite-dimensional model for the motion of microscopic organisms whose propulsion exploits the action of a layer of cilia covering its surface. The model couples Newton's laws driving the organism, considered as a rigid body,…

Particles traveling at high velocities through microfluidic channels migrate from their starting streamlines due to inertial lift forces. Theories predict different scaling laws for these forces and there is little experimental evidence by…

We propose a simple micro-rheology technique to evaluate the viscoelastic properties of complex fluids. The method is based on the use of magnetic wires of a few microns in length submitted to a rotational magnetic field. In this work, the…

The possibility to guide and control magnetic nanoparticles in a non-invasive manner has spawned various applications in biotechnology such as targeted drug delivery and sensing of biological substances. These applications are facilitated…

Micro-scale swimming robots have been envisaged for many medical applications such as targeted drug delivery, where the microrobot will be expected to navigate in a fluid through channels carrying a payload. Alternatively, in many cases,…

Motile cilia are a striking example of functional cellular organelle, conserved across all the eukaryotic species. Motile cilia allow swimming of cells and small organisms and transport of liquids across epithelial tissues. Whilst the…

Biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery, microsurgery, and sensing rely on reaching precise areas within the body in a minimally invasive way. Artificial bacterial flagella (ABFs) have emerged as potential tools for this task…

In the absence of inertia, a reciprocal swimmer achieves no net motion in a viscous Newtonian fluid. Here, we investigate the ability of a reciprocally actuated particle to translate through a complex fluid that possesses a network using…

Micropolar fluid theory, an extension of classical Newtonian fluid dynamics, incorporates angular velocities and rotational inertias and has long been a foundational framework for describing granular flows. We propose a macroscopic model of…

The diffusion of micro- and nanoswimmers in a fluid, confined within irregular structures that impose entropic barriers, is often modeled using overdamped active Brownian dynamics, where viscous effects are paramount and inertia is…

Ciliated organs transport viscous fluids through confined ducts, yet how duct morphology and ciliary activity jointly set the limits of flow rate and sustainable pressure remains unclear. Here, we model dense arrays of beating cilia lining…

The collective motion of arrays of cilia - tiny, hairlike protrusions - drives the locomotion of numerous microorganisms, enabling multimodal motion and autonomous switching between gaits to navigate complex environments. To endow…

The transport of motile entities across modulated energy landscapes plays an important role in a range of phenomena in biology, colloidal science and solid-state physics. Here, an easily implementable strategy that allows for the collective…

We report a novel technique to passively create strong secondary flows at moderate to high flow rates in microchannels, accurately control them and finally, due to their deterministic nature, program them into microfluidic platforms. Based…

Here we demonstrate a synthetic micro-engine, based on long-range controlled movement of colloidal particles, which is induced by a local catalytic reaction. The directed motion at long timescales was achieved by placing specially designed…

Propelling microorganisms through fluids and moving fluids along cellular surfaces are essential biological functions accomplished by long, thin structures called motile cilia and flagella, whose regular, oscillatory beating breaks the…

With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…

We numerically study the dynamics of a passive fluid droplet confined within a microchannel whose walls are covered with a thin layer of active gel. The latter represents a fluid of extensile material modelling, for example, a suspension of…