Related papers: Enhanced active swimming in viscoelastic fluids

We use the boundary element method to study the low-Reynolds number locomotion of a spherical model microorganism in a circular tube. The swimmer propels itself by tangen- tial or normal surface motion in a tube whose radius is on the order…

Active matter systems such as eukaryotic cells and bacteria continuously transform chemical energy to motion. Hence living systems exert active stresses on the complex environments in which they reside. One recurring aspect of this…

Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…

Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…

Active matter exhibits various forms of non-equilibrium states in the absence of external forcing, including macroscopic steady-state currents. Such states are often too complex to be modelled from first principles and our understanding of…

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…

To mimic the motion of biological swimmers in bodily fluids, a novel experimental system of micellar solubilization driven active droplets in a visco-elastic polymeric solution is presented. The visco-elastic nature of the medium,…

The electroosmotic flow of non-Newtonian fluids in deformable microchannels is fundamentally important in the understanding of the hydrodynamics in physiological flows. The performance of these microchannels is governed by the load bearing…

Viscous streaming is an efficient rectification mechanism to exploit flow inertia at small scales for fluid and particle manipulation. It typically entails a fluid vibrating around an immersed solid feature that, by concentrating stresses,…

We study a swimming undulating sheet in the isotropic phase of an active nematic liquid crystal. Activity changes the effective shear viscosity, reducing it to zero at a critical value of activity. Expanding in the sheet amplitude, we find…

We analyse the motion of a flagellated bacterium in a two-fluid medium using slender body theory. The two-fluid model is useful for describing a body moving through a complex fluid with a microstructure whose length scale is comparable to…

We analyze the dynamics of a microswimmer in pressure-driven Poiseuille flow, where fluid inertia is small but non-negligible. Using perturbation theory and the reciprocal theorem, we show that in addition to the classical inertial lift of…

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…

Non-equilibrium dynamics of topological defects can be used as a fundamental propulsion mechanism in microscopic active matter. Here, we demonstrate swimming of topological defect-propelled colloidal particles in (passive) nematic fluids…

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…

We introduce and investigate the wellposedness of a model describing the self-propelled motion of a small abstract swimmer in the 3-D incompressible fluid governed by the nonstationary Stokes equation, typically associated with the low…

In this article, we are interested in studying locomotion strategies for a class of shape-changing bodies swimming in a fluid. This class consists of swimmers subject to a particular linear dynamics, which includes the two most investigated…

Shear-thinning is an important rheological property of many biological fluids, such as mucus, whereby the apparent viscosity of the fluid decreases with shear. Certain microscopic swimmers have been shown to progress more rapidly through…

In this paper we study a mathematical model of one-dimensional swimmers performing a planar motion while fully immersed in a viscous fluid. The swimmers are assumed to be of small size, and all inertial effects are neglected. Hydrodynamic…

We study the fluid dynamics of two fish-like bodies with synchronised swimming patterns. Our studies are based on two-dimensional simulations of viscous incompressible flows. We distinguish between motion patterns that are externally…