Related papers: Passive swimming in low Reynolds number flows
Cells swimming in viscous fluids create flow fields which influence the transport of relevant nutrients, and therefore their feeding rate. We propose a modeling approach to the problem of optimal feeding at zero Reynolds number. We consider…
Vesicle dynamics in unbounded Poiseuille flow is analyzed using a small-deformation theory. Our analytical results quantitatively describe vesicle migration and provide new physical insights. At low ratio between the inner and outer…
Low Reynolds number swimmers frequently move near boundaries, such as spirochetes moving through porous tissues and sperm navigating the reproductive tract. Furthermore, these microorganisms must often navigate non-Newtonian fluids such as…
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…
It has been recently shown that it is possible to design simple artificial swimmers at low Reynoldsnumber that possess only one degree of freedom and, nevertheless, can overcome Purcell's celebratedscallop theorem. One of the few examples…
A simple way to generate propulsion at low Reynolds number is to periodically oscillate a passive flexible filament. Here we present a macroscopic experimental investigation of such a propulsive mechanism. A robotic swimmer is constructed…
Many microorganisms swim through gels, materials with nonzero zero-frequency elastic shear modulus, such as mucus. Biological gels are typically heterogeneous, containing both a structural scaffold (network) and a fluid solvent. We analyze…
Motivated by recent advances in vesicle engineering, we consider theoretically the locomotion of shape-changing bilayer vesicles at low Reynolds number. By modulating their volume and membrane composition, the vesicles can be made to change…
Previous studies on peristalsis, the pumping of fluid along a channel by wave-like displacements of the channel walls, have shown that the elastic properties of the channel and the peristaltic wave shape can influence the flow rate.…
The swimming of a deformable planar slab in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. A continuum of plane wave displacements, symmetric on both sides of the slab and characterized by a…
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…
Biological organisms swimming at low Reynolds number are often influenced by the presence of rigid boundaries and soft interfaces. In this paper we present an analysis of locomotion near a free surface with surface tension. Using a…
The migration of a suspended vesicle in an unbounded Poiseuille flow is investigated numerically in the low Reynolds number limit. We consider the situation without viscosity contrast between the interior of the vesicle and the exterior.…
Swimming in curved spacetimes is a phenomenon whereby free bodies in curved spacetimes are able to propel themselves by performing cyclic internal motions. When originally proposed, it was further suggested that, in the limit of fast…
We use a one dimensional symmetric exclusion model to study pressure and osmosis driven flows through molecular-sized channels, such as biological membrane channels and zeolite pores. Analytic expressions are found for the steady-state flow…
We combine a general formulation of microswimmmer equations of motion with a numerical bead-shell model to calculate the hydrodynamic interactions with the fluid, from which the swimming speed, power and efficiency are extracted. From this…
The swimming of a circular disk at low Reynolds number is studied for distortion waves along its two planar surfaces with wavelength much smaller than the size of the disk. The calculation is based on an extension of Taylor's work for a…
The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
The transport equations for velocity variances are investigated using data from DNS of incompressible channel flows at $Re_\tau$ up to 5200. Each term in the transport equation has been spectrally decomposed to expose the contribution of…
We study the large space and time scale behavior of a totally asymmetric, nearest-neighbor exclusion process in one dimension with random jump rates attached to the particles. When slow particles are sufficiently rare the system has a phase…