Related papers: Viscous propulsion in active transversely-isotropi…
Using shear wave elastography, we measure the changes in the wave speed with the stress produced by a striated muscle during isometric voluntary contraction. To isolate the behaviour of an individual muscle from complementary or…
In Stokes flow, Purcell's scallop theorem forbids objects with time-reversible (reciprocal) swimming strokes from moving. In the presence of inertia, this restriction is eased and reciprocally deforming bodies can swim. A number of recent…
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 theoretically investigate the effect of random fluctuations on the motion of elongated microswimmers near hydrodynamic transport barriers in externally-driven fluid flows. Focusing on the two-dimensional hyperbolic flow, we consider the…
Liquid films coating vertical cylinders can form annular liquid collars which translate downwards under gravity. We investigate the dynamics of a thin viscoplastic liquid film coating the interior or exterior of a vertical cylindrical tube,…
From bacteria and sperm cells to artificial microrobots, self-propelled microscopic objects at low Reynolds numbers often perceive fluctuating mechanical and chemical stimuli and contact exterior wall boundaries both in nature and the…
Synthetic microswimmers show great promise in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery. Their locomotion, however, is subject to stringent constraints due to the dominance of viscous over inertial forces at low…
We tackle the question of how anisotropy in flows subject to background rotation favours structures elongated along the rotation axis, especially in turbulent flows. A new, wave-free mechanism is identified that challenges the current…
We study transport in synthetic, bi-disperse porous structures, with arrays of microchannels interconnected by a nanoporous layer. These structures are inspired by the xylem tissue in vascular plants, in which sap water travels from the…
The decay of homogeneous isotropic turbulence in a variable viscosity fluid with a viscosity ratio up to 15 is analyzed by means of highly resolved direct numerical simulations (DNS) at low Reynolds numbers. The question addressed by the…
Mechanical stress within biological tissue can indicate an anomaly, or can be vital of its function, such as stresses in arteries. Measuring these stresses in tissue is challenging due to the complex, and often unknown, nature of the…
The biological fluids encountered by self-propelled cells display complex microstructures and rheology. We consider here the general problem of low-Reynolds number locomotion in a complex fluid. {Building on classical work on the transport…
We consider the derivation and numerical solution of the flow of passive and active polar liquid crystals, whose molecular orientation is subjected to a tangential anchoring on an evolving curved surface. The underlying passive model is a…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
Turbulence is most commonly associated with high Reynolds number flow, however the framework of turbulent dynamics has been conceptually extended to many other fields, such as magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, elastic wave turbulence in…
Although the motility of the flagellated bacteria, Escherichia coli, has been widely studied, the effect of viscosity on swimming speed remains controversial. The swimming mode of wild-type E.coli is often idealized as a "run-and- tumble"…
We perform analytical and numerical analyses of the propulsion of a rigid body in a viscous fluid subjected to a periodic force with zero average over a period. This general formulation specifically addresses the significant case, where…
Inspired by the lotus effect, many studies in the last decade have focused on micro- and nano-patterned surfaces. They revealed that patterns at the micro-scale combined with high contact angles can significantly reduce skin drag. However,…
We compute the rheological properties of inelastic hard spheres in steady shear flow for general shear rates and densities. Starting from the microscopic dynamics we generalise the Integration Through Transients (\textsc{itt}) formalism to…
The recent interest in using microorganisms for biofuels is motivation enough to study bioconvection and cell dispersion in tubes subject to imposed flow. To optimize light and nutrient uptake, many microorganisms swim in directions biased…