Related papers: Flexible helical yarn swimmers
It has been known for some time that some microorganisms can swim faster in high-viscosity gel-forming polymer solutions. These gel-like media come to mimic highly viscous heterogeneous environment that these microorganisms encounter…
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…
Transformation methods have stimulated many interesting applications of manipulating electromagnetic and acoustic waves by using metamaterials, such as super-lens imaging and cloaking. These successes are mainly due to the form-invariant…
We create a mechanism inspired by bacterial swimmers, featuring two flexible flagella with individual control over rotation speed and direction in viscous fluid environments. Using readily available materials, we design and fabricate…
A flagellated bacterium navigates fluid environments by rotating its helical flagellar bundle. The wobbling of the bacterial body significantly influences its swimming behavior. To quantify the three underlying motions--precession,…
We present a study of the hydrodynamics of an active particle, a model squirmer, in an envi- ronment with a broken rotational symmetry: a nematic liquid crystal. By combining simulations with analytic calculations, we show that the…
The dynamics of a rotating elastic filament is investigated using Stokesian simulations. The filament, straight and tilted with respect to its rotation axis for small driving torques, undergoes at a critical torque a strongly discontinuous…
We study the structure and dynamics of a transient network composed of droplets of microemulsion connected by telechelic polymers. The polymer induces a bridging attraction between droplets without changing their shape. A viscoelastic…
We study collective excitations in a helical electron liquid on a surface of three-dimensional topological insulator. Electron in helical liquid obeys Dirac-like equation for massless particless and direction of its spin is strictly…
We investigate 3-dimensional flagellar swimming in a fluid with a sparse network of stationary obstacles or fibers. The Brinkman equation is used to model the average fluid flow where a flow-dependent term, including a resistance parameter…
Small flexible fibers in a turbulent flow are found to be most of the time as straight as stiff rods. This is due to the cooperative action of flexural rigidity and fluid stretching. However, fibers might bend and buckle when they tumble…
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…
Deformable boundaries are omnipresent in the habitats of swimming microorganisms, leading to intricate hydroelastic couplings. Employing a perturbation theory, valid for small deformations, we study the swimming dynamics of pushers and…
Microswimmers often use chirality to generate translational movement from rotation motion, exhibiting distinct behaviors in complex fluids compared to simple Newtonian fluids. However, the underlying mechanism remains incompletely…
The hydrodynamic flow field generated by self-propelled active particles and swimming microorganisms is strongly altered by the presence of nearby boundaries in a viscous flow. Using a simple model three-linked sphere swimmer, we show that…
Thin bilayers made of elastic sheets with different strain recoveries can be used for dynamic shape morphing through ambient stimuli, such as temperature, mass diffusion, and light. As a fundamentally different approach to designing…
We study the elastic deformations that appear due to tidal and centrifugal forces acting on an elastic sphere in helical motion in a spherically symmetric gravitational field, where gravity is considered to be given by either a Newtonian or…
We study a simple two-dimensional model for motion of an elastic filament subject to internally generated stresses and show that wave-like propagating shapes which can propel the filament can be induced by a self-organized mechanism via a…
Sperm traverse their microenvironment through viscous fluid by propagating flagellar waves; the waveform emerges as a consequence of elastic structure, internal active moments, and low Reynolds number fluid dynamics. Engineered…
Over the past few decades, oscillating flexible foils have been used to study the physics of organismal propulsion in different fluid environments. Here we extend this work to a study of flexible foils in a frictional environment. When the…