Related papers: Turning bacteria suspensions into a "superfluid"
The behavior of flagellated bacteria swimming in non-Newtonian media remains an area with contradictory and conflicting results. We report on the behavior of wild-type and smooth-swimming E. coli in Newtonian, shear thinning and…
We use particle-based simulation to study the rheology of dense suspensions comprising mixtures of small colloids and larger grains, which exhibit shear thinning at low shear rates and shear thickening at high shear rates. By systematically…
Vesicles under shear flow exhibit various dynamics: tank-treading ($tt$), tumbling ($tb$) and vacillating-breathing ($vb$). A consistent higher order theory reveals a direct bifurcation from $tt$ to $tb$ if $C_a\equiv \tau \dot\gamma $ is…
Microswimmer suspensions in Newtonian fluids exhibit unusual macroscale properties, such as a superfluidic behavior, which can be harnessed to perform work at microscopic scales. Since most biological fluids are non-Newtonian, here we study…
The migration of helical particles in viscous shear flows plays a crucial role in chiral particle sorting. Attaching a non-chiral head to a helical particle leads to a rheotactic torque inducing particle reorientation. This phenomenon is…
Bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) exhibit biased motion if kept in a spatially non-uniform chemical environment. Here, we bring out unique time-dependent characteristics of bacterial chemotaxis, in response to a diffusing spatial…
Micro-organisms usually can swim in their liquid environment by flagellar or ciliary beating. In this numerical work, we analyze the influence of flagellar beating on the orbits of a swimming cell in a shear flow. We also calculate the…
Active propulsion, as performed by bacteria and Janus particles, in combination with hydrodynamic interaction results in the accumulation of bacteria at a flat wall. However, in microfluidic devices with cylindrical pillars of sufficiently…
Bacterial swimming is well characterized in uniform liquids at rest. The natural habitat of bacterial swimmers, however, is often dominated by moving fluids and interfaces, resulting in shear flows that may strongly alter bacterial…
We show that plane parabolic flow in a microfluidic channel causes nonmotile helically-shaped bacteria to drift perpendicular to the shear plane. Net drift results from the preferential alignment of helices with streamlines, with a…
We present a modification of a recently developed volume of fluid method for multiphase problems, so that it can be used in conjunction with a fractional step-method and fast Poisson solver, and validate it with standard benchmark problems.…
In this work we present a simple qualitative model to describe shear rheological behavior of the twist-bend nematic liquid crystals. We find that at relatively low shear rate the effective viscosity decreases with the shear rate manifesting…
Addition of particles to a viscoelastic suspension dramatically alters the properties of the mixture, particularly when it is sheared or otherwise processed. Shear-induced stretching of the polymers results in elastic stress that causes a…
We demonstrate 'differential dynamic microscopy' (DDM) for the fast, high throughput characterization of the dynamics of active particles. Specifically, we characterize the swimming speed distribution and the fraction of motile cells in…
An analytical theory is developed to describe the dynamics of a closed lipid bilayer membrane (vesicle) freely suspended in a general linear flow. Considering a nearly spherical shape, the solution to the creeping-flow equations is obtained…
We experimentally investigate shear thickening in dense granular suspensions under oscillatory shear. Directly imaging the suspension-air interface, we observe dilation beyond a critical strain $\gamma_c$ and the end of shear thickening as…
Transport at small scales is classically understood within an equilibrium framework, where dispersion theory successfully describes shear-enhanced diffusion for passive particles in the continuum limit. However, as most bacteria can move on…
Self-organized dynamic patterns in dense active matter are striking manifestations of non-equilibrium physics. A prominent example is the macroscopic elliptical motion observed in quasi-2D bacterial suspensions, which has lacked a physical…
Cells swimming in confined environments are attracted by surfaces. We measure the steady-state distribution of smooth-swimming bacteria (Escherichia coli) between two glass plates. In agreement with earlier studies, we find a strong…
This paper reports experiments on the shear transient response of concentrated non-Brownian suspensions. The shear viscosity of the suspensions is measured using a wide-gap Couette rheometer equipped with a Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV)…