Related papers: A 3-dimensional model of flagellar swimming in a B…
Many microswimmers are able to swim through viscous fluids by employing periodic non-reciprocal deformations of their appendages. Here we use a simple microswimmer model inspired by swimming biflagellates which consists of a spherical cell…
We present an approach for numerically simulating the dynamics of flexible fibers in a three-dimensional shear flow using a scalable immersed boundary (IB) algorithm based on Guermond and Minev's pseudo-compressible fluid solver. The fibers…
The beating flagella of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii play a prominent role in cellular mechanics, enabling cells to both displace and sense surrounding fluid. Specifically, flagellum-induced fluid transport enables microalgae to…
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…
We describe a numerical method to simulate an elastic shell immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid. The method is developed as an extension of the immersed boundary method using shell equations based on the Kirchhoff-Love and the planar…
Although the motility of the flagellated bacteria, Escherichia coli, has been widely studied, the effect of viscosity on swimming speed remains controversial. The swimming mode of wild-type E.coli is often idealized as a "run-and- tumble"…
Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…
We study the fluid drift due to a time-dependent dumbbell model of a microswimmer. The model captures important aspects of real microswimmers such as a time-dependent flagellar motion and a no-slip body. The model consists of a rigid sphere…
An important class of fluid-structure problems involve the dynamics of ordered arrays of immersed, flexible fibers. While specialized numerical methods have been developed to study fluid-fiber systems, they become infeasible when there are…
Many biological fluids are composed of suspended polymers immersed in a viscous fluid. A prime example is mucus, where the polymers are also known to form a network. While the presence of this microstructure is linked with an overall…
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…
Kinetic models provide highly accurate descriptions of plasma waves but involve complex integrals that are computationally expensive to solve. To facilitate a fluid-like treatment of the system, we propose rational approximations for both…
Swimming microorganisms often self propel in fluids with complex rheology. While past theoretical work indicates that fluid viscoelasticity should hinder their locomotion, recent experiments on waving swimmers suggest a possible…
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…
We use a three-bead-spring model to investigate the dynamics of bi-flagellate micro-swimmers near a surface. While the primary dynamics and scattering are governed by geometric-dependent direct contact, the fluid flows generated by the…
It is shown that the kinematic system describing planar non-steady motions of ideal fibre-reinforced fluids may be reduced to a single two-dimensional third-order partial differential equation in which time enters parametrically. A…
We employ three numerical methods to explore the motion of low Reynolds number swimmers, modeling the hydrodynamic interactions by means of the Oseen tensor approximation, lattice Boltzmann simulations and multiparticle collision dynamics.…
In this work, we investigate the application of an advanced nonlinear torsion- and shear-free Kirchhoff rod model, enhanced with a penalty-based barrier function (to simulate the seabed contact), intended for studying the static and dynamic…
The swimming of a bead-spring chain in a viscous incompressible fluid as a model of a sperm is studied in the framework of low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. The optimal mode in the class of planar flagellar strokes of small amplitude is…
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…