Related papers: Life at high Deborah number
Many biological fluids are composed of suspended polymers immersed in a viscous fluid. A prime example is mucus, where the polymers are also known to form a network. While the presence of this microstructure is linked with an overall…
We study the flow of a generalized Newtonian fluid, characterized by a power-law model, through a channel consisting of a wall with a flexible membrane under longitudinal tension. It is assumed that at steady state the flow through the…
Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…
The swimming of a deformable planar slab in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. A continuum of plane wave displacements, symmetric on both sides of the slab and characterized by a…
To further understand the complex behavior of swimming microorganisms, the spontaneous motion of nonliving matter provides essential insights. While substantial research has focused on quantitatively analyzing complex behavioral patterns,…
The dynamics of periodic swimming is studied for two models of a deformable sphere, the dipole-quadrupole model and the quadrupole-octupole model. For the two models the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations can be found exactly to second…
Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…
Self-propelled phoretic swimmers are generally studied in the laminar flow regime, where their low speed renders inertial effects negligible and trajectories highly predictable. This research tackles the challenge of propulsion in the…
A matrix formulation is derived for the calculation of the swimming speed and the power required for swimming of an assembly of rigid spheres immersed in a viscous fluid of infinite extent. The spheres may have arbitrary radii and may…
Small-scale locomotion plays an important role in biology. Different modelling approaches have been proposed in the past. The simplest model is an infinite inextensible two-dimensional waving sheet, {originally introduced by Taylor}, which…
We introduce and investigate the wellposedness of a model describing the self-propelled motion of a small abstract swimmer in the 3-D incompressible fluid governed by the nonstationary Stokes equation, typically associated with the low…
Typical bodily and environmental fluids encountered by biological swimmers consist of dissolved macromolecules such as proteins and polymers, often rendering them non Newtonian. To mimic such scenarios, we investigate the motion of swimming…
Because active particles break time-reversal symmetry, a single non-spherical body placed in an active fluid generates currents. We show that when two or more passive bodies are placed in an active fluid these currents lead to long-range…
We present a two dimensional model of hydrodynamic interaction between a circular swimmer and a circular post at low Reynolds number, using a point singularity description of the swimming activity. We derive a nonlinear dynamical system…
Many microorganisms swim by performing larger non-reciprocal shape deformations that are initiated locally by molecular motors. However, it remains unclear how decentralized shape control determines the movement of the entire organism.…
A famous result by Delort about the two-dimensional incompressible Euler equations is the existence of weak solutions when the initial vorticity is a diffuse bounded Radon measure with distinguished sign. In this paper we are interested in…
We review the literature on swimming in complex fluids. A classification is proposed by comparing the length and time scales of a swimmer with those of nearby obstacles, interpreted broadly, extending from rigid or soft confining boundaries…
We develop a qualitative geometric approach to swimming at low Reynolds number which avoids solving differential equations and uses instead landscape figures of two notions of curvatures: The swimming curvature and the curvature derived…
The dissolution or growth of a droplet in a host liquid is an important part for processes like chemical extraction, chromatography or emulsification. In this work we look at the dissolution of a pair of vertically aligned droplets immersed…
Metachronal swimming, the sequential beating of limbs with a small phase lag, is observed in many organisms at various scales, but has been studied mostly in the limits of high or low Reynolds numbers. Motivated by the swimming of brine…