Related papers: Helical micropumps near surfaces
When the motion of a motile cell is observed closely, it appears erratic, and yet the combination of nonequilibrium forces and surfaces can produce striking examples of organization in microbial systems. While most of our current…
In the pathogenic parasite Trypanosoma brucei, a laterally attached flagellum drives rapid deformation of the complex cell body, producing puzzling dynamics. High-speed defocusing imaging reveals that surface points trace flower-like…
Run-and-tumble is a basic model of persistent motion and a motility strategy widespread in micro-organisms and individual cells. In many natural settings, movement occurs in the presence of confinement. While accumulation at the surface has…
Free-surface electrokinetic flows have been attracting increasing attention from the research community over recent times, as attributable to their diverse fields of applications ranging from fluid mixing, particle manipulation to…
In tissues as diverse as amphibian skin and the human airway, the cilia that propel fluid are grouped in sparsely distributed multiciliated cells (MCCs). We investigate fluid transport in this "mosaic" architecture, with emphasis on the…
The persistent dynamics of active particles makes them explore extended portions of an obstacle's boundary during collisions. From impact to escape, the net applied forces depend on the curvature of the wall and increase in the presence of…
Oscillations of flagella and cilia play an important role in biology, which motivates the idea of functional mimicry as part of bio-inspired applications. Nevertheless, it still remains challenging to drive their artificial counterparts to…
To swim through a viscous fluid, a flagellated bacterium must overcome the fluid drag on its body by rotating a flagellum or a bundle of multiple flagella. Because the drag increases with the size of bacteria, it is expected theoretically…
We show both numerically and analytically that a chemically patterned active pore can act as a micro/nano-pump for fluids, even if it is fore-aft symmetric. This is possible due to a spontaneous symmetry breaking which occurs when advection…
Controlling the motion of nano and microscale objects in a fluid environment is a key factor in designing optimized tiny machines that perform mechanical tasks such as transport of drugs or genetic material in cells, fluid mixing to…
In a classic paper, Edward Purcell analysed the dynamics of flagellated bacterial swimmers and derived a geometrical relationship which optimizes the propulsion efficiency. Experimental measurements for wild-type bacterial species E. coli…
Geometric confinement plays an important role in the dynamics of natural and synthetic microswimmers from bacterial cells to self-propelled particles in high-throughput microfluidic devices. However, little is known about the effects of…
Many micro-swimmers propel themselves by rotating micro-cylindrical organelles such as flagella or cilia. These cylindrical organelles almost never live in free space, yet their motions in a confining geometry can be counter-intuitive. For…
The hydrodynamics of a flagellated microorganism is investigated when swimming close to a planar free-slip surface by means of numerical solu- tions of the Stokes equations obtained via a Boundary Element Method. Depending on the initial…
Motile eukaryotic cells propel themselves in viscous fluids by passing waves of bending deformation down their flagella. An infinitely long flagellum achieves a hydrodynamically optimal low-Reynolds number locomotion when the angle between…
The flow profile in a capillary gap and the pumping efficiency of an acoustic micropump employing Surface Acoustic Waves is investigated both experimentally and theoretically. Such ultrasonic surface waves on a piezoelectric substrate…
Peritrichous bacteria synchronize and bundle their flagella to actively swim while disruption of the bundle leads to tumbling. It is still not known whether the number of flagella represents an evolutionary adaptation towards optimizing…
How systems are endowed with migration capacity is a fascinating question with implications ranging from the design of novel active systems to the control of microbial populations. Bacteria, which can be found in a variety of environments,…
Worm-like filaments that are propelled homogeneously along their tangent vector are studied by Brownian dynamics simulations. Systems in two dimensions are investigated, corresponding to filaments adsorbed to interfaces or surfaces. A large…
Locomotion and fluid pumping near surfaces are ubiquitous in nature, ranging from the slow crawling of snails to the rapid flight of bats. This study categorizes these behaviors based on the Undulation number ($\text{Un}$) and Reynolds…