Related papers: Two-dimensional flagellar synchronization in visco…
Marine plankton are usually modeled as settling elongated micro-swimmers. For the first time, we consider the torque induced by fluid inertia on such swimmers, and we discover that they spontaneously swim in the direction opposite to…
Viscous streaming is an efficient rectification mechanism to exploit flow inertia at small scales for fluid and particle manipulation. It typically entails a fluid vibrating around an immersed solid feature that, by concentrating stresses,…
The steady flow of three viscoelastic fluids (Oldroyd-B, FENE-P, and Owens model for blood) in a two-dimensional channel, partly bound by a deformable, finite thickness neo-Hookean solid, is computed. The limiting Weissenberg number beyond…
Sperm are propelled by bending waves travelling along the flagellum. During steering in gradients of sensory cues, sperm adjust the flagellar beat waveform. Symmetric and asymmetric beat waveforms produce straight and curved swimming paths,…
Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…
Many active biological particles, such as swimming microorganisms or motor-proteins, do work on their environment by going though a periodic sequence of shapes. Interactions between particles can lead to the phase-synchronization of their…
Elastic confinements play an important role in many soft matter systems and affect the transport properties of suspended particles in viscous flow. On the basis of low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics, we present an analytical theory of the…
We consider an isothermal compressible fluid evolving on a cosmological background which may be either expanding or contracting toward the future. The Euler equations governing such a flow consist of two nonlinear hyperbolic balance laws…
Viscoelastic fluids impact the locomotion of swimming microorganisms and can be harnessed to devise new types of self-propelling devices. Here we report on experiments demonstrating the use of normal stress differences for propulsion. Rigid…
The current work studies the dynamics of a microswimmer in pressure-driven flow of a weakly viscoelastic fluid. Employing the second-order fluid model, we show that the self-propelling swimmer experiences a viscoelastic swimming lift in…
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
We present in this fluid dynamics video a novel experimental setup with self-propelled swimmers on a free surface. The swimmers, modeled as flexible thin filaments, are subjected to external electromagnetic forcing driving a propagating…
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…
Swimming at small Reynolds number of a linear assembly of identical spheres immersed in a viscous fluid is studied on the basis of a set of equations of motion for the individual spheres. The motion of the spheres is caused by actuating…
Microswimmers are encountered in a wide variety of biophysical settings. When interacting with flow fields, they show interesting dynamical features such as trapping, clustering, and preferential orientation. One important step towards the…
A system of active colloidal particles driven by harmonic potentials to oscillate about the vertices of a regular polygon, with hydrodynamic coupling between all particles, is described by a piece-wise linear model which exhibits various…
Suspensions of self-propelled particles, such as swimming micro-organisms, are known to undergo complex dynamics as a result of hydrodynamic interactions. This fluid dynamics video presents a numerical simulation of such a suspension, based…
The biological fluids encountered by self-propelled cells display complex microstructures and rheology. We consider here the general problem of low-Reynolds number locomotion in a complex fluid. {Building on classical work on the transport…
In this paper we study the two dimensional motion of three linked rigid bodies moving through a fluid. The bodies change their orientation relative to each other in a way which mimics the swimming of fish. In contrast to previous…
We investigate theoretically the collective dynamics of a suspension of low Reynolds number swimmers that are confined to two dimensions by a thin fluid film. Our model swimmer is characterized by internal degrees of freedom which locally…