Related papers: A three-sphere microswimmer in a structured fluid
A microfluidic device is constructed from PDMS with a single channel having a short section that is a thin flexible membrane, in order to investigate the complex fluid-structure interaction that arises between a flowing fluid and a…
We derive from first principles a three-dimensional theory of self-propelled particle swarming in a viscous fluid environment. Our model predicts emergent collective behavior that depends critically on fluid opacity, mechanism of…
Micro-organisms expend energy moving through complex media. While propulsion speed is an important property of locomotion, efficiency is another factor that may determine the swimming gait adopted by a micro-organism in order to locomote in…
The dynamic impedance of a sphere oscillating in an elastic medium is considered. Oestreicher's formula for the impedance of a sphere bonded to the surrounding medium can be expressed simply in terms of three lumped impedances associated…
Natural habitats of most living microorganisms are distinguished by a complex structure often formed by a porous medium such as soil. The dynamics and transport properties of motile microorganisms are strongly affected by crowded and…
The habitat of microorganisms is typically complex and viscoelastic. A natural question arises: Do polymers in a suspension of active swimmers enhance chaotic motion or promote orientational order? We address this issue by performing…
The current work studies the dynamics of a microswimmer in pressure-driven flow of a weakly viscoelastic fluid. Employing the second-order fluid model, we show that the self-propelling swimmer experiences a viscoelastic swimming lift in…
Swimming at the microscale has recently garnered substantial attention due to the fundamental biological significance of swimming microorganisms and the wide range of biomedical applications for artificial microswimmers. These microswimmers…
The aim of this paper is to derive an analytical expression for the self-propulsion velocity of a micro-swimmer that consists of N spheres moving along a fixed line. The spheres are linked to each other by the rods of the prescribed lengths…
Most classical work on the hydrodynamics of low-Reynolds-number swimming addresses deterministic locomotion in quiescent environments. Thermal fluctuations in fluids are known to lead to a Brownian loss of the swimming direction. As most…
The swimming behavior of bacteria and other microorganisms is sensitive to the physical properties of the fluid in which they swim. Mucus, biofilms, and artificial liquid-crystalline solutions are all examples of fluids with some degree of…
We consider the physical setup of a three-dimensional fluid-structure interaction problem. A viscous compressible gas or liquid interacts with a nonlinear, visco-elastic, three-dimensional bulk solid. The latter is described by a hyperbolic…
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…
Viscoelastic fluids impact the locomotion of swimming microorganisms and can be harnessed to devise new types of self-propelling devices. Here we report on experiments demonstrating the use of normal stress differences for propulsion. Rigid…
Many microorganisms swim through gels, materials with nonzero zero-frequency elastic shear modulus, such as mucus. Biological gels are typically heterogeneous, containing both a structural scaffold (network) and a fluid solvent. We analyze…
The dynamics of periodic swimming is studied for two models of a deformable sphere, the dipole-quadrupole model and the quadrupole-octupole model. For the two models the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations can be found exactly to second…
Few simulations exist for microswimmers near deformable interfaces. Here, we present numerical simulations of the hydrodynamic flows associated with a single microswimmer embedded in a binary fluid mixture. The two fluids demix, separated…
We study the effect of a rough wall on the controllability of micro-swimmers made of several balls linked by thin jacks: the so-called 3-sphere and 4-sphere swimmers. We show that a controllable swimmer (the 4-sphere swimmer) is not…
In this paper we study swimming of a model organism, the so-called Taylor's swimming sheet, in a viscoelastic fluid close to a solid boundary. This situation comprises natural habitats of many swimming microorganisms, and while previous…
Slow dynamics in a fluid are studied in one of the most basic systems possible: polydisperse hard spheres. Monodisperse hard spheres cannot be studied as the slow down in dynamics as the density is increased is preempted by crystallisation.…