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The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
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…
Synthetic microswimmers offer models for cell motility and their tunability makes them promising candidates for biomedical applications. Here we measure the acoustic propulsion of bimetallic micro-rods that, when trapped at the nodal plane…
Microorganisms often encounter anisotropy, for example in mucus and biofilms. We study how anisotropy and elasticity of the ambient fluid affects the speed of a swimming microorganism with a prescribed stroke. Motivated by recent…
Small - but finite - fluid inertia can be leveraged to generate steady flows out of liquid vibrations around an immersed interface. In engineering, external high-frequency drivers (10$^2$-10$^5$ Hz) allow this inertial rectification…
The design of artificial microswimmers is often inspired by the strategies of natural microorganisms. Many of these creatures exploit the fact that elasticity breaks the time-reversal symmetry of motion at low Reynolds numbers, but this…
Experiments have recently shown the feasibility of utilising bacteria as micro-scale robotic devices, with special attention paid to the development of bacteria-driven micro-swimmers taking advantage of built-in actuation and sensing…
Microbubbles excited by acoustic fields inside water oscillate, and generate acoustic radiation forces and drag-induced acoustic streaming. These forces can be harnessed in various biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery and…
When an acoustic wave travels in a lossy medium such as a liquid, it progressively transfers its pseudo-momentum to the fluid, which results in a steady acoustic streaming. Remarkably, the phenomenon involves a balance between sound…
Starting from the linear flow of homogeneous fluid, five modes are defined as eigenvectors of the basic system of conservation laws. Quasi-plane geometry is considered. Projectors that separate overall perturbation of the fluid into…
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…
The ability to propel against flows, i.e., to perform positive rheotaxis, can provide exciting opportunities for applications in targeted therapeutics and non-invasive surgery. To date, no biocompatible technologies exist for navigating…
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,…
Standing acoustic waves have been known to generate Eulerian time-mean 'streaming' flows at least since the seminal investigation of Lord Rayleigh in the 1880s. Nevertheless, a recent body of numerical and experimental evidence has shown…
Typically, in the description of active Brownian particles, a constant effective propulsion force is assumed, which is then subjected to fluctuations in orientation and translation leading to a persistent random walk with an enlarged…
Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…
The flow profile in a capillary gap and the pumping efficiency of an acoustic micropump employing Surface Acoustic Waves is investigated both experimentally and theoretically. Such ultrasonic surface waves on a piezoelectric substrate…
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.…
Acoustic streaming is an ubiquitous phenomenon resulting from time-averaged nonlinear dynamics in oscillating fluids. In this theoretical study, we show that acoustic streaming can be suppressed by two orders of magnitude in major regions…
We derive analytical expressions for the three-dimensional (3D) acoustophoretic motion of spherical microparticles in rectangular microchannels. The motion is generated by the acoustic radiation force and the acoustic streaming-induced drag…