Related papers: Shape dependent phoretic propulsion of slender act…
Self-diffusiophoretic particles exploit local concentration gradients of a solute species in order to self-propel at the micron scale. While an isolated chemically- and geometrically-isotropic particle cannot swim, we show that it can…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
Self-propelled colloids constitute an important class of intrinsically non-equilibrium matter. Typically, such a particle moves ballistically at short times, but eventually changes its orientation, and displays random-walk behavior in the…
Phoretic self-propulsion is a unique example of force- and torque-free motion on small scales. The classical framework describing the flow field around a particle swimming by self-diffusiophoresis neglects the advection of the solute field…
We present an asymptotic theory for solving the dynamics of slender autophoretic loops and knots. Our formulation is valid for non-intersecting 3D centrelines, with arbitrary chemical patterning and varying (circular) cross-sectional…
We study the effect of particle shape on the turbulence in suspensions of spheroidal particles at volume fraction $\phi = 10\%$ and show how the near-wall particle dynamics deeply changes with the particle aspect ratio and how this affects…
We use the boundary element method to study the low-Reynolds number locomotion of a spherical model microorganism in a circular tube. The swimmer propels itself by tangen- tial or normal surface motion in a tube whose radius is on the order…
The study of active matter consisting of many self-propelled (active) swimmers in an imposed flow is important for many applications. Self-propelled swimmers may represent both living and artificial ones such as bacteria and chemically…
In addition to self-propulsion by phoretic mechanisms that arises from an asymmetric distribution of reactive species around a catalytic motor, spherical particles with a uniform distribution of catalytic activity may also propel themselves…
Shear-thinning is an important rheological property of many biological fluids, such as mucus, whereby the apparent viscosity of the fluid decreases with shear. Certain microscopic swimmers have been shown to progress more rapidly through…
We here demonstrate the experimental realization of inanimate micro-swimmer complexes showing emergent self-propulsion at low Reynolds number Re < 10^(-4) in quasi 2D colloidal systems. Guided by the substrate, self-organized propulsion…
In biological systems, microswimmers often propel themselves through complex media. However, many aspects of swimming mechanisms in non-Newtonian fluids remain unclear. This study considers the propulsion of two types of single spherical…
We analyse the angular velocity of a small neutrally buoyant spheroid log rolling in a simple shear. When the effect of fluid inertia is negligible the angular velocity $\omega$ equals half the fluid vorticity. We compute by singular…
Living systems routinely consume energy to achieve motility, often using intricate biomolecular machinery. In this work, we show that active droplets can sustain indefinite self-propulsion of a spherical colloid in an otherwise homogeneous,…
We consider a 2D model of an autophoretic particle in which the particle has a circular shape and emits/absorbs a solute that diffuses and is advected by the suspending fluid. Beyond a certain emission/absorption rate (characterized by a…
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…
Particles in inertialess flows of shear thinning fluids are a model representation for several systems in biology, ecology, and micro-fluidics.In this paper, we analyze the motion of a spheroid in a pressure driven flow of a shear thinning…
Janus phoretic colloids (JPs) self-propel as a result of self-generated chemical gradients and exhibit spontaneous nontrivial dynamics within phoretic suspensions, on length scales much larger than the microscopic swimmer size. Such…
Using experiments with anisotropic vibrated rods and quasi-2D numerical simulations, we show that shape plays an important role in the collective dynamics of self-propelled (SP) particles. We demonstrate that SP rods exhibit local ordering,…
Recent experiments showed that standing acoustic waves could be exploited to induce self-propulsion of rigid metallic particles in the direction perpendicular to the acoustic wave. We propose in this paper a physical mechanism for these…