Related papers: Effective viscosity of microswimmer suspensions
Micro-organisms usually can swim in their liquid environment by flagellar or ciliary beating. In this numerical work, we analyze the influence of flagellar beating on the orbits of a swimming cell in a shear flow. We also calculate the…
Suspensions of motile cells are model systems for understanding the unique mechanical properties of living materials which often consist of ensembles of self-propelled particles. We present here a quantitative comparison of theory against…
Active microswimmers are known to affect the macroscopic viscosity of suspensions in a more complex manner than passive particles. For puller-like microswimmers an increase in the viscosity has been observed. It has been suggested that the…
The motility of microorganisms is influenced greatly by their hydrodynamic interactions with the fluidic environment they inhabit. We show by direct experimental observation of the bi-flagellated alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that fluid…
When particulate suspensions are sheared, perturbations in the shear flows around the rigid particles increase the local energy dissipation, so that the viscosity of the suspension is effectively higher than that of the solvent. For bulk…
The rheological response under simple shear of an active suspension of Escherichia coli is determined in a large range of shear rates and concentrations. The effective viscosity and the time scales characterizing the bacterial organization…
Numerical simulations of vesicle suspensions are performed in two dimensions to study their dynamical and rheological properties. An hybrid method is adopted, which combines a mesoscopic approach for the solvent with a curvature-elasticity…
Cell motility in viscous fluids is ubiquitous and affects many biological processes, including reproduction, infection, and the marine life ecosystem. Here we review the biophysical and mechanical principles of locomotion at the small…
We simulate macroscopic shear experiments in active nematics and compare them with microrheology simulations where a spherical probe particle is dragged through an active fluid. In both cases we define an effective viscosity: in the case of…
In this fluid dynamics video, we demonstrate the microscale mixing enhancement of passive tracer particles in suspensions of swimming microalgae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. These biflagellated, single-celled eukaryotes (10 micron diameter)…
Dense suspensions of soft colloidal particles display a broad range of physical and rheological properties which are still far from being fully understood. To elucidate the role of deformability on colloidal flow, we employ computer…
We consider a suspension of active rigid particles (swimmers) in a steady Stokes flow, where particles are distributed according to a stationary ergodic random process, and we study its homogenization in the macroscopic limit. A key point…
Using a simple model of self-propelled particle, the effective shear viscosity of a dilute, spatially homogeneous suspension of active particles is studied. We use formulation of non-linear Fokker-Planck equation to drive a kinetic…
The microscopic dynamics of objects suspended in a fluid determines the macroscopic rheology of a suspension. For example, as shown by Danker and Misbah [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 98}, 088104 (2007)], the viscosity of a dilute suspension of…
The microalga Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii (CR) is used here as a model system to study the effect of complex environments on the swimming of micro-organisms. Its motion can be modelled by a run and tumble mechanism so that it describes a…
As a paradigmatic model of active fluids, bacterial suspensions show intriguing rheological responses drastically different from their counterpart colloidal suspensions. Although the flow of bulk bacterial suspensions has been extensively…
When submitted to a magnetic field, micron size wires with superparamagnetic properties behave as embedded rheometers and represent interesting sensors for micro-rheology. Here we use rotational magnetic spectroscopy to measure the shear…
Swimming microorganisms can influence the diffusion of passive particles. The effect of this swimmer-particle interaction depends on different properties, such as the hydrodynamic field of the swimmer and the relative sizes of…
We study the rheological behaviour of a dense bidispersed suspension varying the relative size of the two dispersed phases. The main outcome of our analysis is that an enhanced flowability (reduced relative viscosity) of the suspension can…
Microorganism motility often takes place within complex, viscoelastic fluid environments, e.g., sperm in cervicovaginal mucus and bacteria in biofilms. In such complex fluids, strains and stresses generated by the microorganism are stored…