Related papers: Extensibility enables locomotion under isotropic d…
Snakes' bodies are covered in scales that make it easier to slide in some directions than in others. This frictional anisotropy allows for sliding locomotion with an undulatory gait, one of the most common for snakes. Isotropic friction is…
Motility is a fundamental feature of living matter, encompassing single cells and collective behavior. Such living systems are characterized by non-conservativity of energy and a large diversity of spatio-temporal patterns. Thus,…
The use of the reciprocal theorem has been shown to be a powerful tool to obtain the swimming velocity of bodies at low Reynolds number. The use of this method for lower-dimensional swimmers, such as cylinders and sheets, is more…
The self-propulsion of artificial and biological microswimmers (i.e., active colloidal particles) has often been modelled by using a force and a torque entering into the overdamped equations for the Brownian motion of passive particles.…
Slender structures are ubiquitous in biological and physical systems, from bacterial flagella to soft robotic arms. The Cosserat rod provides a mathematical framework for slender bodies that can stretch, shear, twist and bend. In viscous…
The ciliary locomotion and feeding of an axisymmetric micro-swimmer in a complex fluid whose viscosity depends on nutrient concentration are investigated numerically. The micro-swimmer is modeled as having spheroidal geometry, and ciliary…
The effects of fluid elasticity on the swimming behavior of the nematode \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans} are experimentally investigated by tracking the nematode's motion and measuring the corresponding velocity fields. We find that fluid…
We theoretically and computationally study the low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics of a linear active microswimmer surfing on a compressible thin fluid layer characterized by an odd viscosity. Since the underlying three-dimensional fluid is…
Recent findings on the displacements in the surroundings of isotropic flow events in viscous liquids [Phys. Rev. E, to appear Feb. 1999] are generalized to the anisotropic case. Also, it is shown that a flow event is characterized by a…
We use numerical simulations to address locomotion at zero Reynolds number in viscoelastic (Giesekus) fluids. The swimmers are assumed to be spherical, to self-propel using tangential surface deformation, and the computations are…
Biological locomotion in nature is often achieved by the interaction between a flexible body and its surrounding medium. The interaction of a flexible body with granular media is less understood compared with viscous fluids partially due to…
Slender objects are commonplace in microscale flow problems, from soft deformable sensors to biological filaments such as flagella and cilia. Whilst much research has focussed on the local translational motion of these slender bodies,…
In this article, the mechanics of drag reduction on an axisymmetric body of revolution by shallow dimples is presented by using the high-fidelity Reynolds Stress Modeling based simulations. Experimental results of drag evolution from…
The twisting and writhing of a cell body and associated mechanical stresses is an underappreciated constraint on microbial self-propulsion. Multi-flagellated bacteria can even buckle and writhe under their own activity as they swim through…
The paper is devoted to the study of the motion of one-dimensional rigid bodies during a free fall in a quasi-Newtonian hyperviscous fluid at low Reynolds number. We show the existence of a steady solution and furnish sufficient conditions…
Rheological properties of a material often require to be probed under extensional deformation. Examples include fibrous materials such as spider-silk, high-molecular weight polymer melts, and the contractile response of living cells. Such…
Due to the kinematic reversibility of Stokes flow, a body executing a reciprocal motion (a motion in which the sequence of body configurations remains identical under time reversal) cannot propel itself in a viscous fluid in the limit of…
Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…
Swimming in circles occurs in a variety of situations at low Reynolds number. Here we propose a simple model for a swimmer that undergoes circular motion, generalising the model of a linear swimmer proposed by Najafi and Golestanian (Phys.…
Inspired by recent experiments of cells accumulating on anisotropic substrates, we study a two-dimensional, compressible, isotropic, active fluid in the presence of anisotropic friction. We find that regions of anisotropic friction that are…