Related papers: Fluid Elasticity Can Enable Propulsion at Low Reyn…
We investigate the steady self-propelled motion of a rigid body immersed in a three-dimensional incompressible viscous fluid governed by the Navier-Stokes equations. The analysis is performed in a body-fixed reference frame, so that the…
We discuss possible definitions for a stochastic slip velocity that describes the relative motion between large particles and a turbulent flow. This definition is necessary because the slip velocity used in the standard drag model fails…
Measuring lift force on symmetrically shaped obstacles immersed in laminar flow is the quintessential way of signalling odd viscosity. For flow past cylinders, such a lift force does not arise when incompressibility and no-slip boundary…
Large scale features of a randomly isotropically forced incompressible and unbounded rotating fluid are examined in perturbation theory. At first order in both the random force amplitude and the angular velocity we find two types of…
Swimming, i.e., being able to advance in the absence of external forces by performing cyclic shape changes, is particularly demanding at low Reynolds numbers which is the regime of interest for micro-organisms and micro-robots. We focus on…
A three-dimensional mathematical model of a viscous incompressible fluid with two stiff particles is investigated in the near-contact regime. When one of the particles approaches the other motionless particle with prescribed translational…
Rotational dynamics often challenge physical intuition while enabling unique realizations, from the rotor of a gyroscope that maintains its orientation regardless of the outer gimbals, to a tennis racket that rotates around its handle when…
Scaling laws for the propulsive performance of rigid foils undergoing oscillatory heaving and pitching motions are presented. Water tunnel experiments on a nominally two-dimensional flow validate the scaling laws, with the scaled data for…
Locomotion on small scales is dominated by the effects of viscous forces and, as a result, is subject to strong physical and mathematical constraints. Following Purcell's statement of the scallop theorem which delimitates the types of…
Chaotic flows drive mixing and efficient transport in fluids, as well as the associated beautiful complex patterns familiar to us from our every day life experience. Generating such flows at small scales where viscosity takes over is highly…
We experimentally study the transient motion of a colloidal particle actively dragged by an optical trap through different viscoelastic fluids (wormlike micelles, polymer solutions, and entangled $\lambda$-phage DNA). We observe that, after…
We demonstrate with experiments and simulations how microscopic self-propelled particles navigate through environments presenting complex spatial features, which mimic the conditions inside cells, living organisms and future lab-on-a-chip…
Turbulence is ubiquitous in nature yet even for the case of ordinary Newtonian fluids like water our understanding of this phenomenon is limited. Many liquids of practical importance however are more complicated (e.g. blood, polymer melts…
Many microfluidics devices, coating processes or diphasic flows involve the motion of a liquid meniscus on a wet wall. This motion induces a specific viscous force, that exhibits a non-linear dependency in the meniscus velocity. We propose…
In a wide range of applications, microfluidic channels are implemented in soft substrates. In such configurations, where fluidic inertia and compressibility are negligible, the propagation of fluids in channels is governed by a balance…
In this paper we study the evolution of a small rigid body in a viscous incompressible fluid, in particular we show that a small particle is not accelerated by the fluid in the limit when its size converges to zero under a lower bound on…
We consider the physical setup of a three-dimensional fluid-structure interaction problem. A viscous compressible gas or liquid interacts with a nonlinear, visco-elastic, three-dimensional bulk solid. The latter is described by a hyperbolic…
We study the relative translation of two arbitrarily shaped objects, caused by their hydrodynamic interaction as they are forced through a viscous fluid in the limit of zero Reynolds number. It is well known that in the case of two rigid…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
We consider an viscous, incompressible Newtonian fluid flowing through a thin elastic structure. The motion of the structure is described by the equations of a linearised Koiter shell, whose motion is restricted to transverse displacements.…