Related papers: Life at high Deborah number
The mechanism of swimming at very low Reynolds number conditions is a topic of interest to biologists and engineering community. We develop a novel kinematic model of a slender flexible swimmer which locomotes in a low Reynolds number…
In this paper we study the motion of three linked ellipses moving through a viscous fluid in two dimensions. The angles between the ellipses change with time in a specified manner (the gait) and the resulting time varying configuration is…
We study the activity of "living" droplets, which confine 1-6 mesoswimmers in 3D using a superhydrophobic substrate. The swimmers induce oscillations of the droplets at their inherent resonant frequencies, regardless of swimmer size and…
The motion of a freely rotating prolate spheroid in a simple shear flow of a dilute polymeric solution is examined in the limit of large particle aspect ratio, $\kappa$. A regular perturbation expansion in the polymer concentration, $c$, a…
An approximation to the added mass matrix of an assembly of spheres is constructed on the basis of potential flow theory for situations where one sphere is much larger than the others. In the approximation the flow potential near a small…
A body immersed in a supersaturated fluid like carbonated water can accumulate a dynamic field of bubbles upon its surface. If the body is mobile, the attached bubbles can lift it upward against gravity, but a fluid-air interface can clean…
We use numerical simulations to address locomotion at zero Reynolds number in viscoelastic (Giesekus) fluids. The swimmers are assumed to be spherical, to self-propel using tangential surface deformation, and the computations are…
The motion of biological micro-robots -- similar to that of swimming microorganisms such as bacteria or spermatozoa -- is governed by different physical rules than what we experience in our daily life. This is particularly due to the…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…
Bacteria often exhibit upstream swimming, which can cause the contamination of biomedical devices and the infection of organs including the urethra or lungs. This process, called rheotaxis, has been studied extensively in Newtonian fluids.…
Swimming velocity and rate of dissipation of a sphere with surface distortions are discussed on the basis of the Stokes equations of low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. At first the surface distortions are assumed to cause an irrotational…
Cooperation between micro-organisms give rise to novel phenomena like clustering, swarming in suspension. We study the collective behavior of the artificial swimmer called Taylor line at low Reynolds number using multi-particle collision…
Diverse chemical, energy, environmental, and industrial processes involve the flow of polymer solutions in porous media. The accumulation and dissipation of elastic stresses as the polymers are transported through the tortuous, confined…
Bodies of density one half (of the fluid in which they are immersed) that can float in all orientations are investigated. It is shown that expansions starting from and deforming the (hyper)sphere are possible in arbitrary dimensions and…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
Recent experimental work has shown that eukaryotic cells can swim in a fluid as well as crawl on a substrate. We investigate the swimming behavior of Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae who swim by initiating traveling protrusions at the front…
The swimming of a sphere immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid with inertia is studied for surface modulations of small amplitude on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. The mean swimming velocity and the mean rate of dissipation…
Autonomous locomotion is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biology and in physics of active systems at microscopic scale. This includes prokaryotic, eukaryotic cells (crawling and swimming) and artificial swimmers. An outstanding feature is the…
We study how hydrodynamic interactions affect the collective behaviour of active particles suspended in a fluid at high concentrations, with particular attention to lubrication forces which appear when the particles are very close to one…
Biological membranes are host to proteins and molecules which may form domain-like structures resulting in spatially-varying material properties. Vesicles with such heterogeneous membranes can exhibit intricate shapes at equilibrium and…