Related papers: Sand swimming lizard: sandfish
Scombrid fishes and tuna are efficient swimmers capable of maximizing performance to escape predators and save energy during long journeys. A key aspect in achieving these goals is the flexibility of the tail, which the fish optimizes…
We report an experimental study of a binary sand bed under an oscillating water flow. The formation and evolution of ripples is observed. The appearance of a granular segregation is shown to strongly depend on the sand bed preparation. The…
The locomotion and design of microswimmers are topical issues of current fundamental and applied research. In addition to numerous living and artificial active microswimmers, a passive microswimmer was identified only recently: a soft,…
Computational models of aquatic locomotion range from individual modest simple swimmers in 2D to sophisticated 3D individual swimmers to complex multi-swimmer models that attempt to parse collective behavioral dynamics. Each of these models…
Combining geometric mechanics theory, laboratory robotic experiment and numerical simulation, we study the locomotion in granular media (GM) of the simplest non-inertial swimmer, the Purcell three-link swimmer. Using granular resistive…
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…
In this work, an unconsolidated granular medium, made of silica microbeads, is experimentally tested in a laboratory setting. The objective is to investigate the attenuation mechanisms of vertically polarized seismic waves traveling at the…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
One approach to quantifying biological diversity consists of characterizing the statistical distribution of specific properties of a taxonomic group or habitat. Microorganisms living in fluid environments, and for whom motility is key,…
We propose a combined analytical-numerical strategy to predict the dynamics and trajectory of a microswimmer next to a curved spherical obstacle. The microswimmer is actuated by a slip velocity on its surface and a uniformly valid solution…
It has been shown that an anisotropic liquid crystalline (LC) environment can be used to guide the self-propulsion dynamics of dispersed microswimmers, such as bacteria. This type of composite system is named "living nematic" (LN). In the…
Due to the non-linearity of Hertzian contacts, the speed of sound $c$ in granular matter is expected to increase with pressure as $P^{1/6}$. A static layer of grains under gravity is thus stratified so that bulk waves are refracted toward…
Dissipative environments are ubiquitous in nature, from microscopic swimmers in low-Reynolds-number fluids to macroscopic animals in frictional media. In this study, motivated by various behaviours of {\it Caenorhabditis elegans} during…
Many microorganisms live and evolve in complex fluids. Examples include mammalian spermatozoa in cervical mucus, worms (e.g., \textit{C. elegans}) in wet soil, and bacteria (e.g., \textit{H. pylori}) in our stomach lining. Due to the…
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…
We study two microswimmers consisting of a spherical rigid head and a passive elastic tail. In the first one the tail is clamped to the head, and the system oscillates under the action of an external torque. In the second one, head and tail…
Understanding the transport properties of microorganisms and self-propelled particles in porous media has important implications for human health as well as microbial ecology. In free space, most microswimmers perform diffusive random walks…
We present a lattice Boltzmann study of the hydrodynamics of a fully resolved squirmer, radius R, confined in a slab of fluid between two no-slip walls. We show that the coupling between hydrodynamics and short-range repulsive interactions…
Most aquatic vertebrates swim by lateral flapping of their bodies and caudal fins. While much effort has been devoted to understanding the flapping kinematics and its influence on the swimming efficiency, little is known about the stability…
We discuss the scaling laws for the flow generated in a viscous fluid by a wave propagating along a solid boundary. This has applications to the displacement of tiny objects on solids, under the effect of progressive surface waves and for…