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The swimming behavior of bacteria and other microorganisms is sensitive to the physical properties of the fluid in which they swim. Mucus, biofilms, and artificial liquid-crystalline solutions are all examples of fluids with some degree of…
Lubrication flows between two solid surfaces can be found in a variety of biological and engineering settings. In many of these systems, the lubricant exhibits viscoelastic properties, which modify the associated lubrication forces. Here,…
Self-propelled colloidal swimmers move by pushing the adjacent fluid backwards. The resulting motion of an asymmetric body depends on the profile of pushing velocity over its surface. We describe a method of predicting the motion arising…
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…
Simulations of undulatory swimming in viscoelastic fluids with large amplitude gaits show concentration of polymer elastic stress at the tips of the swimmers.We use a series of related theoretical investigations to probe the origin of these…
A body immersed in a highly viscous fluid can locomote by drawing in and expelling fluid through pores at its surface. We consider this mechanism of jet propulsion without inertia in the case of spheroidal bodies, and derive both the…
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 sphere immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid with inertia is studied for surface modulations of small amplitude on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. The mean swimming velocity and the mean rate of dissipation…
We conduct experiments with force-free magnetically-driven rigid helical swimmers in Newtonian and viscoelastic (Boger) fluids. By varying the sizes of the swimmer body and its helical tail, we show that the impact of viscoelasticity…
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…
This paper examines the rigid body motion of a spheroid sedimenting in a Newtonian fluid with a spatially varying viscosity field. The fluid is at zero Reynolds number, and the viscosity varies linearly in space in an arbitrary direction…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often have to propel through a variety of environments, ranging from heterogeneous suspending media to strong geometrical confinement. Under confinement, local flow fields generated by microswimmers,…
Recent findings of possible applications of bio-friendly synthetic self-phoretic swimmers, have motivated the researchers in investigating the various motion-generating mechanisms to optimize the operating characteristics of the same. In…
We theoretically study the self-propulsion of a thin (slender) colloid driven by asymmetric chemical reactions on its surface at vanishing Reynolds number. Using the method of matched asymptotic expansions, we obtain the colloid…
The behaviour of microscopic swimmers has previously been explored near large scale confining geometries and in the presence of very small-scale surface roughness. Here we consider an intermediate case of how a simple microswimmer, the…
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…
Many forms of locomotion, both natural and artificial, are dominated by viscous friction in the sense that without power expenditure they quickly come to a standstill. From geometric mechanics, it is known that for swimming at the…
We calculate the hydrodynamic force on a small spherical, unsteady squirmer moving with a time-dependent velocity in a fluid at rest, taking into account convective and unsteady fluid inertia effects in perturbation theory. Our results…
We experimentally study a scallop-like swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings in a nearly frictionless, cohesive granular medium consisting of hydrogel spheres. Significant locomotion is found when the swimmer's flapping frequency matches…
Various aspects of self-motility of chemically active colloids in Newtonian fluids can be captured by simple models for their chemical activity plus a phoretic slip hydrodynamic boundary condition on their surface. For particles of simple…