Related papers: Versatile low-Reynolds-number swimmer with three-d…
Anisotropic viscous drag is usually believed to be a requirement for the low Reynolds number locomotion of slender bodies such as flagella and cilia. Here we show that locomotion under isotropic drag is possible for extensible slender…
Recent experiments have demonstrated that small-scale rotary devices installed in a microfluidic channel can be driven passively by the underlying flow alone without resorting to conventionally applied magnetic or electric fields. In this…
Attempts to disentangle shear-flow turbulence often focus on identifying relatively simple solutions, such as travelling waves or periodic orbits. We show, however, that capturing multiscale features requires considering states at least as…
We describe traveling waves in a basic model for three-dimensional water-wave dynamics in the weakly nonlinear long-wave regime. Small solutions that are periodic in the direction of translation (or orthogonal to it) form an…
We investigate aspects of low-magnetic-Reynolds-number flow between two parallel, perfectly insulating walls, in the presence of an imposed magnetic field parallel to the bounding walls. We find a functional basis to describe the flow, well…
We present a dynamic path planning algorithm to navigate an amphibious rotor craft through a concave time-invariant obstacle field while attempting to minimize energy usage. We create a nonlinear quaternion state model that represents the…
Many microorganisms swim through gels, materials with nonzero zero-frequency elastic shear modulus, such as mucus. Biological gels are typically heterogeneous, containing both a structural scaffold (network) and a fluid solvent. We analyze…
The possibility of microscopic swimming by extraction of energy from an external flow is discussed, focusing on the migration of a simple trimer across a linear shear flow. The geometric properties of swimming, together with the possible…
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…
We present a simple experimental realization of a two-dimensional floating body that can remain in equilibrium in any orientation. This system is based on a class of shapes known as Zindler curves, which possess the remarkable geometric…
This paper presents an analytical model and a geometric numerical integrator for a system of rigid bodies connected by ball joints, immersed in an irrotational and incompressible fluid. The rigid bodies can translate and rotate in…
We perform direct numerical simulations of planar jets of non-Newtonian fluids at low Reynolds number, in typical laminar conditions for a Newtonian fluid. We select three different non-Newtonian fluid models characterized by shear-thinning…
Computational models of aquatic locomotion range from individual modest simple swimmers in 2D to sophisticated 3D individual swimmers to complex multi-swimmer models that attempt to parse collective behavioral dynamics. Each of these models…
In the absence of inertia, a reciprocal swimmer achieves no net motion in a viscous Newtonian fluid. Here, we investigate the ability of a reciprocally actuated particle to translate through a complex fluid that possesses a network using…
Deep autoencoder neural networks can generate highly accurate, low-order representations of turbulence. We design a new family of autoencoders which are a combination of a 'dense-block' encoder-decoder structure (Page et al, J. Fluid Mech.…
A paradigmatic microswimmer is the three-linked-spheres model, which follows a minimalist approach for propulsion by shape shifting. As such, it has been the subject of numerous analytical and numerical studies. In this Rapid Communication,…
Soft robotics has the potential to revolutionize robotic locomotion, in particular, soft robotic swimmers offer a minimally invasive and adaptive solution to explore and preserve our oceans. Unfortunately, current soft robotic swimmers are…
Unlike macroscopic swimmers, microswimmers operate in a low-Reynolds-number regime dominated by viscous forces. This paper investigates the controllability of a magnetic microswimmer composed of a spherical magnetic head and an elastic,…
We investigate the translational motion of rotating colloidal systems at moderate Reynolds numbers (Re), focusing on particle dimers in snowman-like configurations under three scenarios: (i) two co-rotating spheres driven by an external…
We have investigated kinematic reversibility in a cold atom system under strongly overdamped conditions. In such systems, inertia is negligible, and for noninteracting rigid particles, inverting the external force causes a perfect reversal…