Related papers: Extensibility enables locomotion under isotropic d…
Over the past few decades, oscillating flexible foils have been used to study the physics of organismal propulsion in different fluid environments. Here we extend this work to a study of flexible foils in a frictional environment. When the…
We derive asymptotic expansions for the displacement at the boundary of a smooth, elastic body in the presence of small inhomogeneities. Both the body and the inclusions are allowed to be anisotropic. This work extends prior work of…
Edges are abundant when elastic solids glide in guiding rails or fluids are contained in vessels. We here address induced displacements in elastic solids or small-scale flows in viscous fluids in the vicinity of one such edge. For this…
Eukaryotic swimming cells such as spermatozoa, algae or protozoa use flagella or cilia to move in viscous fluids. The motion of their flexible appendages in the surrounding fluid induces propulsive forces that balance with the viscous drag…
A comprehensive study has been undertaken on the dimensional swelling of graphene-reinforced elastomers in liquids. Anisotropic swelling was observed for samples reinforced with graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs), induced by the in-plane…
Within developing embryos, tissues flow and reorganize dramatically on timescales as short as minutes. This includes epithelial tissues, which often narrow and elongate in convergent extension movements due to anisotropies in external…
Micro-swimmer locomotion in heterogeneous media is increasingly relevant in biological physics due to the prevalence of microorganisms in complex environments. A model for such porous media is the Brinkman fluid which accounts for a sparse…
Self-propelled phoretic swimmers are generally studied in the laminar flow regime, where their low speed renders inertial effects negligible and trajectories highly predictable. This research tackles the challenge of propulsion in the…
Understanding swimming in soft yielding media is challenging due to their complex deformation response to the swimmer's motion. We experimentally show that a scallop-inspired swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings generates locomotion in…
A flexible membrane deforming its shape in time can self-propel in a viscous fluid. Alternatively, if the membrane is anchored, its deformation will lead to fluid transport. Past work in this area focused on situations where the deformation…
Tracer particles immersed in suspensions of biological microswimmers such as E. coli or C. reinhardtii display phenomena unseen in conventional equilibrium systems, including strongly enhanced diffusivity relative to the Brownian value and…
Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…
Physics governing the locomotion of microorganisms and other microsystems is dominated by viscous damping. An effective swimming strategy involves the non-reciprocal and periodic deformations of the considered body. Here, we show that a…
A flexible sheet in uniform parallel flow is studied in order to quantify its fluid dynamic drag and fluid-elastic stability characteristics. An experimental campaign is undertaken that involves a cantilevered sheet in air flow…
A conformation space kinetic model is constructed to drive the deformation cycle of a three-sphere swimmer to achieve propulsion at low Reynolds number. We analyze the effect of an external load on the performance of this kinetic swimmer,…
For nearly a century, researchers have tried to understand the swimming of aquatic animals in terms of a balance between the forward thrust from swimming movements and drag on the body. Prior approaches have failed to provide a separation…
Propulsion at microscopic scales is often achieved through propagating traveling waves along hair-like organelles called flagella. Taylor's two-dimensional swimming sheet model is frequently used to provide insight into problems of…
Measurements of the capillary-driven thinning and breakup of fluid filaments are widely used to extract extensional rheological properties of complex materials. For viscoelastic (e.g., polymeric) fluids, the determination of the longest…
We study forced oscillations of a rod with a body attached to its free end so that the motion of a system is described by two sets of equations, one of integer and the other of the fractional order. To the constitutive equation we associate…
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…