Related papers: Shape dependent phoretic propulsion of slender act…
Motion of elongated particles in shear is studied. In applications where particles are much heavier than the carrying fluid, e.g. aerosols, the influence of particle inertia dominates the particle dynamics. Assuming that the particle only…
Catalytic microswimmers typically swim close to walls due to hydrodynamic and/or phoretic effects. The walls in turn are known to affect their propulsion, making it difficult to single out the contributions that stem from particle-based…
How anisotropic particles rotate and orient in a flow depends on the hydrodynamic torque they experience. Here we compute the torque acting on a small spheroid in a uniform flow by numerically solving the Navier-Stokes equations. Particle…
We study the translational and rotational dynamics of neutrally-buoyant finite-size spheroids in hydrodynamic turbulence by means of fully resolved numerical simulations. We examine axisymmetric shapes, from oblate to prolate, and the…
Swimming microorganisms often have to propel in complex, non-Newtonian fluids. We carry out experiments with self-propelling helical swimmers driven by an externally rotating magnetic field in shear-thinning, inelastic fluids. Similarly to…
Microscopic active droplets are able to swim autonomously in viscous flows: this puzzling feature stems from solute exchanges with the surrounding fluid via surface reactions or their spontaneous solubilisation, and the interfacial flows…
To spontaneously break their intrinsic symmetry and self-propel at the micron scale, isotropic active colloidal particles and droplets exploit the non-linear convective transport of chemical solutes emitted/consumed at their surface by the…
We describe experiments and simulations demonstrating the propulsion of a neutrally-buoyant swimmer that consists of a pair of spheres attached by a spring, immersed in a vibrating fluid. The vibration of the fluid induces relative motion…
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…
We study the orientation statistics of spheroidal, axisymmetric microswimmers, with shapes ranging from disks to rods, swimming in chaotic, moderately turbulent flows. Numerical simulations show that rod-like active particles preferentially…
We consider arbitrary-shaped microswimmers of spherical topology and propose a framework for expressing their slip velocity in terms of tangential basis functions defined on the boundary of the swimmer using the Helmholtz decomposition.…
The motion of thin curved falling particles is ubiquitous in both nature and industry but is not yet widely examined. Here, we describe an experimental study on the dynamics of thin cylindrical shells resembling broken bottle fragments…
Collective behavior of self-propelled particles is observed on a microscale for swimmers such as sperm and bacteria as well as for protein filaments in motility assays. The properties of such systems depend both on their dimensionality and…
We report simulations of a spherical Janus particle undergoing exothermic surface reactions around one pole only. Our model excludes self-phoretic transport by design. Nevertheless, net motion occurs from direct momentum transfer between…
Among the many types of artificial motile nano- and microparticles that have been developed in the past, colloidal particles that exhibit propulsion when they are exposed to ultrasound are particularly advantageous. Their properties,…
A three-dimensional model of a low-Reynold's swimmer is introduced and analyzed in this paper. This model consists of two large and small spheres connected by two perpendicular thin rods. The geometry of this system is motivated by the…
Understanding the stochastic dynamics of tracer particles in active fluids is important for identifying the physical properties of flow generating objects such as colloids, bacteria or algae. Here, we study both analytically and numerically…
In this paper, we explore the hydrodynamics of spheroidal active particles in viscosity gradients. This work provides a more accurate modeling approach, in comparison to spherical particles, for anisotropic organisms like Paramecium…
Catalytic swimmers have attracted much attention as alternatives to biological systems for examining collective microscopic dynamics and the response to physico-chemical signals. Yet, understanding and predicting even the most fundamental…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion depending on the environment in which they find themselves. One mode is swimming by blebbing or other shape changes, and in this paper we analyze a class of…