Related papers: Swimming in Granular Media
We study the dynamics of an intruder moving through a fluidized granular medium in three dimensions ($d=3$). The intruder and grains have both translational and rotational degrees of freedom. The energy-dissipation mechanism is solid…
Inspired by how the shape deformations in active organisms help them to migrate through disordered porous environments, we simulate active ring polymers in two-dimensional random porous media. Flexible and inextensible active ring polymers…
Fluidization of solid particles by an ascending fluid is frequent in industry because of the high rates of mass and heat transfers achieved. However, in some cases blockages occur and hinder the correct functioning of the fluidized bed. In…
The persistent character of the motion of active particles gives rise to accumulation at boundaries. I investigate the problem of run-and-tumble swimmers confined in a 1D box with hard walls, reporting expressions for the particles…
We analyse the effect of confining rigid and elastic boundaries on the motility of a model dipolar microswimmer. Flexible boundaries are deformed by the velocity field of the swimmer in such a way that the motility of both extensile and…
Active particles, which interact hydrodynamically, display a remarkable variety of emergent collective phenomena. We use squirmers to model spherical microswimmers and explore the collective behavior of thousands of them under the influence…
Dense granular media have a compaction between the random loose and random close packings. For these dense media the concept of a granular pressure depending on compaction is not unanimously accepted because they are often in a "frozen"…
Laboratory experiments and numerical simulation reveal that a submerged intruder dragged horizontally at constant velocity within a granular medium experiences a lift force whose sign and magnitude depend on the intruder shape. Comparing…
Run-and-tumble is a basic model of persistent motion and a motility strategy widespread in micro-organisms and individual cells. In many natural settings, movement occurs in the presence of confinement. While accumulation at the surface has…
Deformable boundaries are omnipresent in the habitats of swimming microorganisms, leading to intricate hydroelastic couplings. Employing a perturbation theory, valid for small deformations, we study the swimming dynamics of pushers and…
We investigate the effective friction encountered by an intruder moving through a sedimented medium which consists of transparent granular hydrogels immersed in water, and the resulting motion of the medium. We show that the effective…
The intruder segregation dependence on size and density is investigated in the framework of a hydrodynamic theoretical model for vibrated granular media. We propose a segregation mechanism based on the difference of densities between…
An artificial microswimmer drifts in response to spatio-temporal modulations of an activating suspension medium. We consider two competing mechanisms capable of influencing its tactic response: angular fluctuations, which help it explore…
Periodic fluidization of solids in a gas medium can generate structured bubbling patterns. This phenomenon has been successfully reproduced in fluidized bed systems called pulsed-fluidized beds, known for their efficient mixing and…
The current study presents a systematic investigation of the locomotion performance of a swimmer with a wide range of parameter settings. Two-dimensional simulations with the immersed boundary method are employed for the fluid-structure…
We theoretically describe the dynamics of swimmer populations confined in thin liquid films. We first demonstrate that hydrodynamic interactions between confined swimmers only depend on their shape and are independent of their specific…
We analyse the motion of a flagellated bacterium in a two-fluid medium using slender body theory. The two-fluid model is useful for describing a body moving through a complex fluid with a microstructure whose length scale is comparable to…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
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…
We experimentally study a scallop-like swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings in a nearly frictionless, cohesive granular medium consisting of hydrogel spheres. Significant locomotion is found when the swimmer's flapping frequency matches…