Related papers: Two-dimensional flagellar synchronization in visco…
The present habilitation thesis in theoretical biological physics addresses two central dynamical processes in cells and organisms: (i) active motility and motility control and (ii) self-organized pattern formation. The unifying theme is…
Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…
The collective swimming of soft robots in an infinite viscous fluid is an emergent phenomenon due to the non-reciprocal hydrodynamic interactions between individual swimmers. These physical interactions give rise to unique spatiotemporal…
The swimming of a two-sphere system oscillating in a viscous fluidis studied on the basis of simplified equations of motion which take account of both friction and inertial effects. In the model the friction follows from an Oseen…
We present experiments to study the relaxation of a nano-scale cylindrical perturbation at one of the two interfaces of a thin viscous free-standing polymeric film. Driven by capillarity, the film flows and evolves towards equilibrium by…
We study the fluid drift due to a time-dependent dumbbell model of a microswimmer. The model captures important aspects of real microswimmers such as a time-dependent flagellar motion and a no-slip body. The model consists of a rigid sphere…
Cilia and flagella exhibit regular bending waves that perform mechanical work on the surrounding fluid, to propel cellular swimmers and pump fluids inside organisms. Here, we quantify a force-velocity relationship of the beating flagellum,…
Cellular appendages conferring motility, such as flagella or cilia, are known to synchronise their periodic beats. The origin of synchronisation is a combination of long-range hydrodynamic interactions with physical mechanisms allowing the…
Efficient locomotion is important for the evolution of complex life, yet the physical principles selecting specific swimming strokes often remain entangled with biological constraints. In viscous fluids, the scallop theorem constrains the…
Many swimming microorganisms, such as bacteria and sperm, use flexible flagella to move through viscoelastic media in their natural environments. In this paper we address the effects a viscoelastic fluid has on the motion and beating…
We investigate the motion of a flexible Stokesean flagellar swimmer realised as a yarn made of two intertwined elastomer fibres, one active, that can reversibly change its length in response to a local excitation causing transition to the…
An asymptotic approach is employed to study the swimming speed of a two-dimensional Taylor swimming sheet beneath a Brinkman layer of finite thickness. This configuration is representative of a swimmer confined within a porous non-Newtonian…
The spherical alga Volvox swims by means of flagella on thousands of surface somatic cells. This geometry and its large size make it a model organism for studying the fluid dynamics of multicellularity. Remarkably, when two nearby Volvox…
Organisms often swim through fluids that are spatially inhomogeneous. If the fluids are polymeric, gradients in polymer concentration may lead to gradients in both fluid viscosity and elasticity. In this letter, we present theoretical…
The aim of this study is to develop a semi-analytical method to investigate fluid-structure coupling of concentric double shells with different lengths and elastic behaviours. Co-axial shells constitute a cylindrical circular container and…
We investigate the effects of helical swimmer shape (i.e., helical pitch angle and tail thickness) on swimming dynamics in a constant viscosity viscoelastic (Boger) fluid via a combination of particle tracking velocimetry, particle image…
By synergistically combining modeling, simulation and experiments, we show that there exists a regime of self-propulsion in which the inertia in the fluid dynamics can be separated from that of the swimmer. This is demonstrated by the…
We study theoretically the viscoelastic properties of sheared binary fluids that have strong dynamical asymmetry between the two components. The dynamical asymmetry arises due to asymmetry between the viscoelastic stresses, particularly the…
A striking feature of the collective behavior of spherical microswimmers is that for sufficiently strong self-propulsion they phase-separate into a dense cluster coexisting with a low-density dis- ordered surrounding. Extending our previous…
The aim of this paper is to propose a new numerical model to simulate 2D vesicles interacting with a newtonian fluid. The inextensible membrane is modeled by a chain of circular rigid particles which are maintained in cohesion by using two…