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Recent experiments showed that standing acoustic waves could be exploited to induce self-propulsion of rigid metallic particles in the direction perpendicular to the acoustic wave. We propose in this paper a physical mechanism for these…
Microfluidic channels have emerged as useful tools to control dynamic forcing on transported microscale objects, as encountered in emulsions, biological flows, and other soft matter systems. Tailored channel designs enable precise…
Fluid mechanics plays a vital role in early vertebrate embryo development, an example being the establishment of left-right asymmetry. Following the dorsal-ventral and anterior-posterior axes, the left-right axis is the last to be…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often have to propel through a variety of environments, ranging from heterogeneous suspending media to strong geometrical confinement. Under confinement, local flow fields generated by microswimmers,…
The self-propulsion of artificial and biological microswimmers (i.e., active colloidal particles) has often been modelled by using a force and a torque entering into the overdamped equations for the Brownian motion of passive particles.…
A model is presented for predicting the capture of magnetic micro/nano-particles in a bioseparation microsystem. This bioseparator consists of an array of conductive elements embedded beneath a rectangular microfluidic channel. The magnetic…
Many microfluidic devices use macroscopic pressure differentials to overcome viscous friction and generate flows in microchannels. In this work, we investigate how the chemical and geometric properties of the channel walls can drive a net…
This review treats asymmetric colloidal particles moving through their host fluid under the action of some form of propulsion. The propulsion can come from an external body force or from external shear flow. It may also come from…
Metamaterials are structures composed of repeating unit-cells which enable macro-scale properties not found in nature. Since metamaterials are typically solid structures with predetermined interconnections, it is challenging to leverage…
Chirality plays a major role in nature, from particle physics to DNA, and its control is much sought-after due to the scientific and technological opportunities it unlocks. For magnetic materials, chiral interactions between spins promote…
Using both dynamical density functional theory and particle-resolved Brownian dynamics simulations, we explore the flow of two-dimensional colloidal solids and fluids driven through a linear channel with a geometric constriction. The flow…
Magnetic fields and magnetic materials have promising microfluidic applications. For example, magnetic micro-convection can enhance mixing considerably. However, previous studies have not explained increased effective diffusion during this…
The performed magnetohydrodynamic simulation examines the importance of magnetofluid evolution which naturally leads to current sheets in the presence of three-dimensional (3D) magnetic nulls. Initial magnetic field is constructed by…
Inertial fluid flow deformation around pillars in a microchannel is a new method for controlling fluid flow. Sequences of pillars have been shown to produce a rich phase space with a wide variety of flow transformations. Previous work has…
Controlling the motion of nano and microscale objects in a fluid environment is a key factor in designing optimized tiny machines that perform mechanical tasks such as transport of drugs or genetic material in cells, fluid mixing to…
Many of the biological phenomena involve collective dynamics driven by self-propelled motion and nonequilibrium force (i.e., activity) that result in features unexpected from equilibrium physics. On the other hand, biological experiments…
Large scale motion of cytoplasm called cytoplasmic streaming occurs in some large eukaryotic cells to stir the cell's constituents. In Drosophila oocytes, microtubules have been observed to undergo undulating motion, curving to form…
Mechanical forces such as fluid shear have been shown to enhance cell growth and differentiation, but knowledge of their mechanistic effect on cells is limited because the local flow patterns and associated metrics are not precisely known.…
Motility is a basic feature of living microorganisms, and how it works is often determined by environmental cues. Recent efforts have focused on develop- ing artificial systems that can mimic microorganisms, and in particular their…
We propose to apply an "effective boundary condition" method to the problem of chiral propulsion. For the case of a rotating helix moving through a fluid at a low Reynolds number, the method amounts to replacing the original helix (in the…