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Viscous streaming has emerged as an effective method to transport, trap, and cluster inertial particles in a fluid. Previous work has shown that this transport is well described by the Maxey-Riley equation augmented with a term representing…
Many cells exhibit large-scale active circulation of their entire fluid contents, a process termed cytoplasmic streaming. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in plant cells, often presenting strikingly regimented flow patterns. The…
Based on first- and second-order perturbation theory, we present a numerical study of the temporal build-up and decay of unsteady acoustic fields and acoustic streaming flows actuated by vibrating walls in the transverse cross-sectional…
Active diffusiophoresis - swimming through interaction with a self-generated, neutral, solute gradient - is a paradigm for autonomous motion at the micrometer scale. We study this propulsion mechanism within a linear response theory.…
Symmetry breaking is essential for biological microswimmers to achieve locomotion in viscous environments. Such asymmetry in the swimming mechanism enables the generation of directional forces that overcome fluid resistance, leading to…
We present a detailed numerical study of a microscopic artificial swimmer realized recently by Dreyfus et al. in experiments [R. Dreyfus et al., Nature 437, 862 (2005)]. It consists of an elastic filament composed of superparamagnetic…
A minimal design for a molecular swimmer is proposed that is a based on a mechanochemical propulsion mechanism. Conformational changes are induced by electrostatic actuation when specific parts of the molecule temporarily acquire net…
Implantable medical devices and biosensors are pivotal in revolutionizing the field of medical technology by opening new dimensions in the field of disease detection and cure. These devices need to harness a biocompatible and…
A novel mechanism for the transport of microscale particles in viscous fluids is demonstrated. The mechanism exploits the trapping of such particles by rotational streaming cells established in the vicinity of an oscillating cylinder,…
Microorganisms are able to overcome the thermal randomness of their surroundings by harvesting energy to navigate in viscous fluid environments. In a similar manner, synthetic colloidal microswimmers are capable of mimicking complex…
Many active fluid systems encountered in biology are set in total geometric confinement. Cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells is a prominent and ubiquitous example, in which cargo-carrying molecular motors move along polymer filaments and…
Acoustic streaming shows great potential in applications such as bubble dynamics, cell aggregation, and nano-sized particle isolation in the biomedical and drug industries. As the acoustic shock distance decreases with the increase of…
The efficient mixing of fluid samples in miniaturized total analysis systems is essential for numerous applications including biological screening assays, chemical extraction, polymerization, cell analysis, and protein folding. Miniaturized…
Electromagnetically propelled helical nanoswimmers offer great potential for nanorobotic applications. Here, the effect of confinement on their propulsion is characterized using lattice-Boltzmann simulations. Two principal mechanisms give…
We formulate and solve the equations governing the dynamics of a microscopic artificial swimmer composed of a head and of a tail made of a thin film of permanent magnetic material. This is a variant of the model swimmer proposed by Dreyfus…
Three-dimensional simulations with fully resolved hydrodynamics are performed to study the collective motion of model swimmers in confinement. We show that certain swimming mechanisms can lead to traveling wave-like collective motion even…
Suspended colloidal particles interacting chemically with a solute are able to self-propel by autophoretic motion when they are asymmetrically patterned (Janus colloids). Here we demonstrate that the chemical anisotropy is not a necessary…
Conventional microparticle transports by light or sound are realized along a straight line. Recently, this limit has been overcome in optics as the growing up of the self-accelerating Airy beams, which are featured by many peculiar…
Viscous streaming is an efficient mechanism to exploit inertia at the microscale for flow control. While streaming from rigid features has been thoroughly investigated, when body compliance is involved, as in biological settings, little is…
A remarkable variety of organisms use metachronal coordination (i.e., numerous neighboring appendages beating sequentially with a fixed phase lag) to swim or pump fluid. This coordination strategy is used by microorganisms to break symmetry…