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Recent studies show that spherical motile micro-organisms in turbulence subject to gravitational torques gather in down-welling regions of the turbulent flow. By analysing a statistical model we analytically compute how shape affects the…
We study the dynamics and the statistics of dilute suspensions of gyrotactic swimmers, a model for many aquatic motile microorganisms. By means of extensive numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations at different Reynolds numbers,…
Phytoplankton are the foundation of aquatic food webs. Through photosynthesis, phytoplankton draw down CO2 at magnitudes equivalent to forests and other terrestrial plants and convert it to organic material that is then consumed by other…
Systems of motile microorganisms exhibit a multitude of collective phenomena, including motility-induced phase separation and turbulence. Sensing of the environment and adaptation of movement plays an essential role in the emergent…
Ice crystals settling through a turbulent cloud are rotated by turbulent velocity gradients. In the same way, turbulence affects the orientation of aggregates of organic matter settling in the ocean. In fact most solid particles encountered…
In this study, we investigate the sedimentation of prolate spheroids in a quiescent fluid by means of the particle-resolved direct numerical simulation. With the increase of the particle volume fraction $\phi$ from $0.1\%$ to $10\%$, we…
Turbulence plays a major role in shaping marine community structure as it affects organism dispersal and guides fundamental ecological interactions. Below oceanographic mesoscale dynamics, turbulence also impinges on subtle…
We study the effect of particle shape on the turbulence in suspensions of spheroidal particles at volume fraction $\phi = 10\%$ and show how the near-wall particle dynamics deeply changes with the particle aspect ratio and how this affects…
Many aquatic microorganisms are able to swim. In natural environments they typically do so in the presence of flows. In recent years it has been shown that the interplay of swimming and flows can give rise to interesting and biologically…
Direct numerical simulation is used to investigate effects of turbulent flow in the confined geometry of a face-centered cubic porous unit cell on the transport, clustering, and deposition of fine particles at different Stokes numbers ($St…
We study the clustering properties of inertial particles in a turbulent viscoelastic fluid. The investigation is carried out by means of direct numerical simulations of turbulence in the Oldroyd-B model. The effects of polymers on the small…
We investigate the effect of cooperative interactions in an ensemble of microorganisms, modelled as self-propelled disk-like and rod-like particles, in a three-dimensional turbulent flow to show flocking as an emergent phenomenon. Building…
Microswimmers are encountered in a wide variety of biophysical settings. When interacting with flow fields, they show interesting dynamical features such as trapping, clustering, and preferential orientation. One important step towards the…
We present a numerical study of settling and clustering of small inertial particles in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence. Particles are denser than the fluid, but not in the limit of being much heavier than the displaced fluid. At fixed…
We present a new numerical model to simulate settling trajectories of discretized individual or a mixture of particles of different geometrical shapes in a quiescent fluid and their flow trajectories in a flowing fluid. Simulations unveiled…
We demonstrate that diffusiophoretic, thermophoretic and chemotactic phenomena in turbulence lead to clustering of particles on multi-fractal sets that can be described using one single framework, valid when the particle size is much…
The motility of microorganisms is often biased by gradients in physical and chemical properties of their environment, with myriad implications on their ecology. Here we show that fluid acceleration reorients gyrotactic plankton, triggering…
We study the dynamics of gyrotactic swimmers in turbulence, whose orientation is governed by gravitational torque and local fluid velocity gradient. The gyrotaxis strength is measured by the ratio of the Kolmogorov time scale to the…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
We study the spatial distribution of gyrotactic microorganisms transported by a three-dimensional turbulent flow generated by direct numerical simulations. We find that gyrotaxis combines with turbulent fluctuations to produce small scales…