Related papers: Swimming efficiency in a shear-thinning fluid
Undulatory locomotion is ubiquitous in nature and observed in different media, from the swimming of flagellated microorganisms in biological fluids, to the slithering of snakes on land, or the locomotion of sandfish lizards in sand. Despite…
Locomotion and transport of microorganisms in fluids is an essential aspect of life. Search for food, orientation toward light, spreading of off-spring, and the formation of colonies are only possible due to locomotion. Swimming at the…
Cell motility in viscous fluids is ubiquitous and affects many biological processes, including reproduction, infection, and the marine life ecosystem. Here we review the biophysical and mechanical principles of locomotion at the small…
We combine a general formulation of microswimmmer equations of motion with a numerical bead-shell model to calculate the hydrodynamic interactions with the fluid, from which the swimming speed, power and efficiency are extracted. From this…
The locomotion of microorganisms and spermatozoa in complex viscoelastic fluids is of critical importance in many biological processes such as fertilization, infection, and biofilm formation. Depending on their propulsion mechanisms,…
An asymptotic approach is employed to study the swimming speed of a two-dimensional Taylor swimming sheet beneath a Brinkman layer of finite thickness. This configuration is representative of a swimmer confined within a porous non-Newtonian…
Swimming micro-organisms such as flagellated bacteria and sperm cells have fascinating locomotion capabilities. Inspired by their natural motion, there is an ongoing effort to develop artificial robotic nano-swimmers for potential in-body…
The current study presents a systematic investigation of the locomotion performance of a swimmer with a wide range of parameter settings. Two-dimensional simulations with the immersed boundary method are employed for the fluid-structure…
Bacterial swimming is well characterized in uniform liquids at rest. The natural habitat of bacterial swimmers, however, is often dominated by moving fluids and interfaces, resulting in shear flows that may strongly alter bacterial…
Many microorganisms swim through gels and non-Newtonian fluids in their natural environments. In this paper, we focus on microorganisms which use flagella for propulsion. We address how swimming velocities are affected in nonlinearly…
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…
In a fluid environment, flagellated microswimmers propel themselves by rotating their flagella. The morphology of these flagella significantly influences forward speed, swimming efficiency, and directional stability, which are critical for…
The swimming of an assembly of rigid spheres immersed in a viscous fluid of infinite extent is studied in low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. The instantaneous swimming velocity and rate of dissipation are expressed in terms of the…
It has been shown that a nanoliter chamber separated by a wall of asymmetric obstacles can lead to an inhomogeneous distribution of self-propelled microorganisms. Although it is well established that this rectification effect arises from…
Several micro-organisms, such as bacteria, algae, or spermatozoa, use flagella or cilia to swim in a fluid, while many other micro-organisms instead use ample shape deformation, described as amoeboid, to propel themselves by either crawling…
We study the energy expenditure and structural correlations in semi-dilute to concentrated suspensions of squirmers using active fast Stokesian dynamics simulations. Specifically, we simulate apolar active suspensions of squirmers, or…
Self-propulsion at low Reynolds number is notoriously restricted, a concept that is commonly known as the "scallop theorem". Here we present a truly self-propelled swimmer (force- and torque- free) that, while unable to swim in a Newtonian…
In this work we present a simple qualitative model to describe shear rheological behavior of the twist-bend nematic liquid crystals. We find that at relatively low shear rate the effective viscosity decreases with the shear rate manifesting…
Swimming by shape changes at low Reynolds number is widely used in biology and understanding how the efficiency of movement depends on the geometric pattern of shape changes is important to understand swimming of microorganisms and in…
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…