Related papers: Gyrotactic swimmer dispersion in pipe flow: testin…
There is much current interest in modelling suspensions of algae and other micro-organisms for biotechnological exploitation, and many bioreactors are of tubular design. Using generalized Taylor dispersion theory, we develop a…
Shear flow significantly affects the transport of swimming algae in suspension. For example, viscous and gravitational torques bias bottom-heavy cells to swim towards regions of downwelling fluid (gyrotaxis). It is necessary to understand…
The combined impact of axial stretching and cross-stream diffusion on the downstream transport of solute is termed Taylor dispersion. The dispersion of active suspensions is qualitatively distinct: viscous and external torques can establish…
Swimming microorganisms rely on effective mixing strategies to achieve efficient nutrient influx. Recent experiments, probing the mixing capability of unicellular biflagellates, revealed that passive tracer particles exhibit anomalous…
We study the dynamics of gyrotactic microswimmers suspended in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence by using direct numerical simulations (DNS). The swimmers are characterized by three non-dimensional parameters: their aspect ratio…
Classical Taylor-Aris dispersion theory is extended to describe the transport of suspensions of self-propelled dipolar cells in a tubular flow. General expressions for the mean drift and effective diffusivity are determined exactly in terms…
Ensembles of biological and artificial microswimmers produce long-range velocity fields with strong nonequilibrium fluctuations, which result in dramatic increase diffusivity of embedded particles (tracers). While such enhanced diffusivity…
In the presence of a laminar shear flow, the diffusion of passive colloidal particles is enhanced in the direction parallel to the flow. This classical phenomenon is known as Taylor-Aris dispersion. Besides, microorganisms, such as active…
The experiments of Leptos et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 198103 (2009)] show that the displacements of small particles affected by swimming microorganisms achieve a non-Gaussian distribution, which nevertheless scales diffusively -- the…
Active (i.e., self-propelled or swimming) particles moving through an isotropic fluid exhibit conventional diffusive behavior. We report anomalous diffusion of an active particle moving in an anisotropic, nematic background. Whilst the…
Mass dispersion in oscillatory flows is intimately linked to various environmental and biological processes, offering a distinct contrast to dispersion in steady flows due to the periodic expansion and contraction of particle patches. In…
Gyrotactic algae are bottom heavy, motile cells whose swimming direction is determined by a balance between a buoyancy torque directing them upwards and fluid velocity gradients. Gyrotaxis has, in recent years, become a paradigmatic model…
We study the dynamics and the statistics of dilute suspensions of gyrotactic swimmers, a model for many aquatic motile microorganisms. By means of extensive numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations at different Reynolds numbers,…
Swimming microorganisms can influence the diffusion of passive particles. The effect of this swimmer-particle interaction depends on different properties, such as the hydrodynamic field of the swimmer and the relative sizes of…
Transport phenomena of microswimmers in fluid flows play a crucial role in various biological processes, including bioconvection and cell sorting. In this paper, we investigate the dispersion behavior of chiral microswimmers in a simple…
We study the small scale clustering of gyrotactic swimmers transported by a turbulent flow, when the intrinsic variability of the swimming parameters within the population is considered. By means of extensive numerical simulations, we find…
A suspension of gyrotactic microalgae Chlamydomonas augustae swimming in a cylindrical water vessel in solid-body rotation is studied. Our experiments show that swimming algae form an aggregate around the axis of rotation, whose intensity…
The dispersion of a passive colloid immersed in a bath of non-interacting and non-Brownian run-and-tumble microswimmers in two dimensions is analyzed using stochastic simulations and an asymptotic theory, both based on a minimal model of…
Populations of swimming microorganisms produce fluid motions that lead to dramatically enhanced diffusion of tracer particles. Using simulations of suspensions of swimming particles in a periodic domain, we capture this effect and show that…
Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…