Related papers: Viscous propulsion in active transversely-isotropi…
The present work investigates the mechanical behaviour of finite-size, elastic and inertial fibres freely moving in a homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow at moderate Reynolds number. Fully-resolved, direct numerical simulations, based…
Swimming at the microscale has recently garnered substantial attention due to the fundamental biological significance of swimming microorganisms and the wide range of biomedical applications for artificial microswimmers. These microswimmers…
We develop a mathematical theory for a class of compressible viscoelastic rate-type fluids with stress diffusion. Our approach is based on the concepts used in the nowadays standard theory of compressible Newtonian fluids as…
Direct numerical simulations are used to investigate the individual dynamics of large spherical particles suspended in a developed homogeneous turbulent flow. A definition of the direction of the particle motion relative to the surrounding…
The deformation of thin rods in a viscous liquid is central to the mechanics of motility in cells ranging from \textit{Escherichia coli} to sperm. Here we use experiments and theory to study the shape transition of a flexible rod rotating…
We study experimentally a a three-dimensional reduced model of a sail shape performing pitching oscillations around a mean incidence angle ($\alpha_{m}$) with respect to an incoming flow in a hydrodynamic channel at a constant velocity…
Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in the biological world and strongly affect the stability, topology, and transport properties of active suspensions in viscous flow. Based on a far-field analytical model, the…
We analyse the time dependent non-linear rheology of a dilute bacterial suspension (e.g. E. coli) for a pair of impulsively started linear flows - simple shear and uniaxial extension. The rheology is governed by the bacterium orientation…
Motivated by the motion of biopolymers and membranes in solution, this article presents a formulation of the equations of motion for curves and surfaces in a viscous fluid. We focus on geometrical aspects and simple variational methods for…
Microorganisms and synthetic microswimmers often encounter complex environments consisting of networks of obstacles embedded into viscous fluids. Such settings include biological media, such as mucus with filamentous networks, as well as…
The cell cortex is a thin layer beneath the plasma membrane that gives animal cells mechanical resistance and drives most of their shape changes, from migration, division to multicellular morphogenesis. It is mainly composed of actin…
Microswimmers, and among them aspirant microrobots, generally have to cope with flows where viscous forces are dominant, characterized by a low Reynolds number ($Re$). This implies constraints on the possible sequences of body motion, which…
This study investigates the effect of a Maxwellian fluid on the propagation of waves in poroelastic media. Based on a fractional derivative stress-strain relation, a viscous dissipation function is obtained to measure the viscoelastic…
Active fluids, such as suspensions of microswimmers, are known to self-organize into complex spatio-temporal flow patterns. An intriguing example is mesoscale turbulence, a state of dynamic vortex structures exhibiting a characteristic…
Many biological fluids are composed of suspended polymers immersed in a viscous fluid. A prime example is mucus, where the polymers are also known to form a network. While the presence of this microstructure is linked with an overall…
In a world without inertia, Purcell's scallop theorem states that in a Newtonian fluid a time-reversible motion cannot produce any net force or net flow. Here we consider the extent to which the nonlinear rheological behavior of…
Suspensions of self-propelled bodies generate a unique mechanical stress owing to their motility that impacts their large-scale collective behavior. For microswimmers suspended in a fluid with negligible particle inertia, we have shown that…
We apply the geometric theory of swimming at low Reynolds number to the study of nearly circular swimmers in two-dimensional fluids with non-vanishing Hall, or "odd", viscosity. The Hall viscosity gives an off-diagonal contribution to the…
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,…
Swimming at low Reynolds number in Newtonian fluids is only possible through non-reciprocal body deformations due to the kinematic reversibility of the Stokes equations. We consider here a model swimmer consisting of two linked spheres,…