Related papers: Modelling of surfactant-driven front instabilities…
We present a study of the spreading of liquid droplets on a solid substrate at very small scales. We focus on the regime where effective wetting energy (binding potential) and surface tension effects significantly influence steady and…
We investigate the dynamics of a colony of crawling, proliferating cells with a minimal, mechanical cell model. The cells consist of two disks, modelling the cell body and a pseudopod, connected by a finite extensible spring. The cells…
The transition from monolayers to multilayered structures in bacterial colonies is a fundamental step in biofilm development. Observed across different morphotypes and species, this transition is triggered within freely growing bacterial…
We examine theoretically the spreading of a viscous liquid drop over a thin film of uniform thickness, assuming the liquid's viscosity is regulated by the concentration of a solute that is carried passively by the spreading flow. The solute…
Surfactants are critical in natural processes and engineering, but measuring their concentrations in non-equilibrium conditions and in the presence of flow is difficult. Therefore, computational methods are a key tool for improving our…
The motion of a viscous deformable droplet suspended in an unbounded Poiseuille flow in the presence of bulk-insoluble surfactants is studied analytically. Assuming the convective transport of fluid and heat to be negligible, we perform a…
Microbial interactions regulate their spread and survival in competitive environments. It is not clear if the physical parameters of the environment regulate the outcome of these interactions. In this work, we show that the opportunistic…
Controlling and suppressing bacterial accumulation at solid surfaces is essential for preventing biofilm formation and biofouling. Whereas various chemical surface treatments are known to reduce cell accumulation and attachment, the role of…
In the minutes immediately preceeding the rupture of a soap bubble, distinctive and repeatable patterns can be observed. These quasi-stable transient structures are associated with the instabilities of the complex Marangoni flows on the…
We consider two thin layers of immiscible liquids on a heated solid horizontal substrate. The free liquid-liquid and liquid-gas interfaces of such a two-layer (or bilayer) liquid film may be unstable due to effective molecular interactions…
Free boundaries of biofilms advancing on surfaces evolve according to conservation laws coupled with systems of partial differential equations for velocities, pressures and chemicals affecting cell behavior. Thin film approximations lead to…
Growth patterns generated by filamentous organisms (e.g. actinomycetes and fungi) involve spatial and temporal dynamics at different length scales. Several mathematical models have been proposed in the last thirty years to address these…
We investigate the coalescence of surfactant-laden water droplets by using several different surfactant types and a wide range of concentrations by means of a coarse-grained model obtained by the statistical associating fluid theory. Our…
Bacteria can form a great variety of spatially heterogeneous cell density patterns, ranging from simple concentric rings to dynamical spiral waves appearing in growing colonies. These pattern formation phenomena are important as they…
The intricate wobbling motion of flagellated bacteria, characterized by the periodic precession of the cell body, is a determinant factor in their motility and navigation within complex fluid environments. While well-studied in quiescent…
The physics of micron-scale biological colonies usually benefits from different out-of-equilibrium sources. In bacterial colonies and cellular tissues, the growth process is among the important active sources that determine the dynamics. In…
Cell colonies of bacteria, tumour cells and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell…
Myelin figures are interfacial structures formed when certain surfactants swell in excess water. Here, I present data and model calculations suggesting myelin formation and growth is due to the fluid flow of surfactant, driven by the…
We study the formation of spot patterns seen in a variety of bacterial species when the bacteria are subjected to oxidative stress due to hazardous byproducts of respiration. Our approach consists of coupling the cell density field to a…
The rheological properties of biological tissues are core to processes such as cancer metastasis, wound healing and embryo development. The emergence of tissue and organ structures during morphogenesis requires the precise formation of…