Related papers: Planar Multi-link Swimmers: Experiments and Theore…
Microorganisms living in microfluidic environments often form multi-species swarms, where they can leverage collective motions to achieve enhanced transport and spreading. Nevertheless, there is a general lack of physical understandings of…
This paper presents an analytical model and a geometric numerical integrator for a system of rigid bodies connected by ball joints, immersed in an irrotational and incompressible fluid. The rigid bodies can translate and rotate in…
Fishes, cetaceans, and many other aquatic vertebrates undulate their bodies to propel themselves through water. Swimming requires an intricate interplay between sensing the environment, making decisions, controlling internal dynamics, and…
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…
Studies of model microswimmers have significantly contributed to the understanding of the principles of self-propulsion we have today. However, only a small number of microswimmer types have been amenable to analytic modeling, and further…
Hydrodynamic interactions are crucial for determining the cooperative behavior of microswimmers at low Reynolds numbers. Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of the scaling and strength of the interactions in the case of a pair of…
Matching the swimming efficiency and agility of fish has remained an elusive goal in underwater robotics. Such locomotion capabilities rely on complex vortex interactions between the robot's body and the surrounding fluid. However,…
In a recent letter (Friedrich et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109:138102, 2012), a minimal model swimmer was proposed that propels itself at low Reynolds numbers by a revolving motion of a pair of spheres. The motion of the two spheres can…
Squirmers are models of a class of microswimmers, such as ciliated organisms and phoretic particles, that self-propel in fluids without significant deformation of their body shape. Available techniques for their simulation are based on the…
Combining geometric mechanics theory, laboratory robotic experiment and numerical simulation, we study the locomotion in granular media (GM) of the simplest non-inertial swimmer, the Purcell three-link swimmer. Using granular resistive…
The hydrodynamic interactions between a sedimenting microswimmer and a solid wall have ubiquitous biological and technological applications. A plethora of gravity-induced swimming dynamics near a planar no-slip wall provides a platform for…
We use a three-bead-spring model to investigate the dynamics of bi-flagellate micro-swimmers near a surface. While the primary dynamics and scattering are governed by geometric-dependent direct contact, the fluid flows generated by the…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
Natural swimmers rely for their survival on sensors that gather information from the environment and guide their actions. The spatial organization of these sensors, such as the visual fish system and lateral line, suggests evolutionary…
We study the three-dimensional dynamics of a spherical microswimmer in cylindrical Poiseuille flow which can be mapped onto a Hamiltonian system. Swinging and tumbling trajectories are identified. In 2D they are equivalent to oscillating…
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…
Pairwise hydrodynamic interactions of microswimmers form the fundamental building blocks for understanding their more complex collective behaviors. In this work, we revisit the canonical problem of two interacting squirmers swimming along…
The paper is about the parking 3-sphere swimmer ($\text{sPr}_3$). This is a low-Reynolds number model swimmer composed of three balls of equal radii. The three balls can move along three horizontal axes (supported in the same plane) that…
The development of versatile robots capable of traversing challenging and irregular environments is of increasing interest in the field of robotics, and metameric robots have been identified as a promising solution due to their slender,…
We present numerical simulations of simplified models for swimming organisms or robots, using chordwise flexible elastic plates. We focus on the tip vortices originating from three-dimensional effects due to the finite span of the plate.…