Related papers: Directed migration of microscale swimmers by an ar…

The swimming direction of biological or artificial microscale swimmers tends to be randomised over long time-scales by thermal fluctuations. Bacteria use various strategies to bias swimming behaviour and achieve directed motion against a…

When swimming at low Reynolds numbers, inertial effects are negligible and reciprocal movements cannot induce net motion. Instead, symmetry breaking is necessary to achieve net propulsion. Directed swimming can be supported by magnetic…

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…

Guiding active microswimmers by external fields to requested target locations is a promising strategy to realize complex transport on the microscale. To this end, one possibility consists of attaching the microswimmers to orientable passive…

With the continuing rapid development of artificial microrobots and active particles, questions of microswimmer guidance and control are becoming ever more relevant and prevalent. In both the applications and theoretical study of such…

Swimming consists by definition in propelling through a fluid by means of bodily movements. Thus, from a mathematical point of view, swimming turns into a control problem for which the controls are the deformations of the swimmer. The aim…

The optimal strategy for a microscopic swimmer to migrate across a linear shear flow is discussed. The two cases, in which the swimmer is located at large distance, and in the proximity of a solid wall, are taken into account. It is shown…

Fish swim by undulating their bodies. These propulsive motions require coordinated shape changes of a body that interacts with its fluid environment, but the specific shape coordination that leads to robust turning and swimming motions…

Microswimmers are exposed in nature to crowded environments and their transport properties depend in a subtle way on the interaction with obstacles. Here, we investigate a model for a single ideal circle swimmer exploring a two-dimensional…

We propose a minimal model of microswimmer based on immersed boundary methods. We describe a swimmer (either pusher or puller) as a distribution of point forces, representing the swimmer's flagellum and body, with only the latter subjected…

Finding the fastest path to a desired destination is a vitally important task for microorganisms moving in a fluid flow. We study this problem by building an analytical formalism for overdamped microswimmers on curved manifolds and…

The self-propelled motion of microscopic bodies immersed in a fluid medium is studied using molecular dynamics simulation. The advantage of the atomistic approach is that the detailed level of description allows complete freedom in…

We propose a combined analytical-numerical strategy to predict the dynamics and trajectory of a microswimmer next to a curved spherical obstacle. The microswimmer is actuated by a slip velocity on its surface and a uniformly valid solution…

We study the energetic efficiency of navigating microswimmers by explicitly taking into account the geometry of their body. We show that, as their shape transitions from prolate to oblate, non-steering microswimmers rotated by flow…

The current work studies the dynamics of a microswimmer in pressure-driven flow of a weakly viscoelastic fluid. Employing the second-order fluid model, we show that the self-propelling swimmer experiences a viscoelastic swimming lift in…

Artificial microswimmers are a new technology with promising microfluidics and biomedical applications, such as directed cargo transport, microscale assembly, and targeted drug delivery. A fundamental barrier to realising this potential is…

Many biological microswimmers locomote by periodically beating the densely-packed cilia on their cell surface in a wave-like fashion. While the swimming mechanisms of ciliated microswimmers have been extensively studied both from the…

Marine microorganisms must cope with complex flow patterns and even turbulence as they navigate the ocean. To survive they must avoid predation and find efficient energy sources. A major difficulty in analysing possible survival strategies…

Microswimmers can acquire information on the surrounding fluid by sensing mechanical queues. They can then navigate in response to these signals. We analyse this navigation by combining deep reinforcement learning with direct numerical…

We theoretically and computationally study the low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics of a linear active microswimmer surfing on a compressible thin fluid layer characterized by an odd viscosity. Since the underlying three-dimensional fluid is…