Related papers: Setting the pace of microswimmers: when increasing…
We experimentally investigate the fluidization of a granular material subject to mechanical vibrations by monitoring the angular velocity of a vane suspended in the medium and driven by an external motor. On increasing the frequency we…
Bubbles rising in viscoelastic liquids may exhibit a jump discontinuity of the rise velocity as a critical bubble volume is exceeded. The phenomenon has been extensively investigated in the literature, both by means of experiments as well…
The swimming trajectories of self-propelled organisms or synthetic devices in a viscous fluid can be altered by hydrodynamic interactions with nearby boundaries. We explore a multipole description of swimming bodies and provide a general…
In nature, metachronal coordination is an efficient strategy for fluid pumping and self-propulsion. Yet, mimetic systems for this type of organization are scarce. Recently, metachronal motion was observed in a bead-based magnetocapillary…
The current study presents a systematic investigation of the locomotion performance of a swimmer with a wide range of parameter settings. Two-dimensional simulations with the immersed boundary method are employed for the fluid-structure…
The effects of fluid elasticity on the swimming behavior of the nematode \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans} are experimentally investigated by tracking the nematode's motion and measuring the corresponding velocity fields. We find that fluid…
We examine swimmers comprising of two rigid spheres which oscillate periodically along their axis of symmetry, considering both when the oscillation is in phase and anti-phase, and study the effects of fluid viscoelasticity on their net…
Swimming cells often have to self-propel through fluids displaying non-Newtonian rheology. While past theoretical work seems to indicate that stresses arising from complex fluids should systematically hinder low-Reynolds number locomotion,…
We describe experiments and simulations demonstrating the propulsion of a neutrally-buoyant swimmer that consists of a pair of spheres attached by a spring, immersed in a vibrating fluid. The vibration of the fluid induces relative motion…
Microswimmers can acquire information on the surrounding fluid by sensing mechanical queues. They can then navigate in response to these signals. We analyse this navigation by combining deep reinforcement learning with direct numerical…
Interactions between microorganisms and their complex flowing environments are essential in many biological systems. We develop a model for microswimmer dynamics in non-Newtonian Poiseuille flows. We predict that swimmers in…
Studies of model microswimmers have significantly contributed to the understanding of the principles of self-propulsion we have today. However, only a small number of microswimmer types have been amenable to analytic modeling, and further…
In the stochastic formulation of viscous hydrodynamics, the velocity of a fluid element fluctuates satisfying a similar relation to the quantum-mechanical uncertainty relation. Using a non-relativistic toy model, we show that the presence…
The skill to swim fast results from the interplay between generating high thrust while minimizing drag. In front crawl, swimmers achieve this goal by adapting their inter-arm coordination according to the race pace. A transition has been…
We consider a suspension of active rigid particles (swimmers) in a steady Stokes flow, where particles are distributed according to a stationary ergodic random process, and we study its homogenization in the macroscopic limit. A key point…
Conventionally, a microscopic particle that performs a reciprocal stroke cannot move through its environment. This is because at small scales, the response of simple Newtonian fluids is purely viscous and flows are time-reversible. We show…
We investigate the hydrodynamic interaction between two elastic swimmers which are composed of three spheres and two harmonic springs. In this model, the natural length of each spring is assumed to undergo a prescribed cyclic change,…
We present a detailed numerical study of a microscopic artificial swimmer realized recently by Dreyfus et al. in experiments [R. Dreyfus et al., Nature 437, 862 (2005)]. It consists of an elastic filament composed of superparamagnetic…
Marine microorganisms must cope with complex flow patterns and even turbulence as they navigate the ocean. To survive they must avoid predation and find efficient energy sources. A major difficulty in analysing possible survival strategies…
The aim of this paper is to derive an analytical expression for the self-propulsion velocity of a micro-swimmer that consists of N spheres moving along a fixed line. The spheres are linked to each other by the rods of the prescribed lengths…