Related papers: Thrifty swimming with shear-thinning
Microorganisms living in microfluidic environments often form multi-species swarms, where they can leverage collective motions to achieve enhanced transport and spreading. Nevertheless, there is a general lack of physical understandings of…
Nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations are used to study the shear thinning behavior of immiscible symmetric polymer blends. The phase separated polymers are subjected to a simple shear flow imposed by moving a wall parallel to the…
Microorganisms often encounter anisotropy, for example in mucus and biofilms. We study how anisotropy and elasticity of the ambient fluid affects the speed of a swimming microorganism with a prescribed stroke. Motivated by recent…
Marine organisms manipulate their surrounding flow through their swimming dynamics, which affects the transport of their own odor cues. We demonstrate by direct numerical simulations how a group of swimmers, moving at intermediate Reynolds…
In the study of microscopic flows, self-propulsion has been particularly topical in recent years, with the rise of miniature artificial swimmers as a new tool for flow control, low Reynolds number mixing, micromanipulation or even drug…
In addition to enabling movement towards environments with favourable living conditions, swimming by microorganisms has also been linked to enhanced mixing and improved nutrient uptake by their populations. Experimental studies have shown…
Low Reynolds number direct simulations of large populations of hydrodynamically interacting swimming particles confined between planar walls are performed. The results of simulations are compared with a theory that describes dilute…
Interaction of motile microrganisms with a nearby solid substrate is a well studied phenomenon. However, the effects of hydrodynamic slippage on the substrate have received a little attention. In the present study, within the framework of…
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…
We review recent advances in rectification control of artificial microswimmers, also known as Janus particles, diffusing along narrow, periodically corrugated channels. The swimmer self-propulsion mechanism is modeled so as to incorporate a…
We investigate the molecular origin of shear-thinning in melts of flexible, semiflexible and rigid oligomers with coarse-grained simulations of a sheared melt. Alignment, stretching and tumbling modes or suppression of the latter all…
We perform direct numerical simulations of planar jets of non-Newtonian fluids at low Reynolds number, in typical laminar conditions for a Newtonian fluid. We select three different non-Newtonian fluid models characterized by shear-thinning…
Deformable boundaries are omnipresent in the habitats of swimming microorganisms, leading to intricate hydroelastic couplings. Employing a perturbation theory, valid for small deformations, we study the swimming dynamics of pushers and…
The dynamics of a spheroidal vesicle, bounded by an inextensible membrane, is analyzed in function of the enclosed fluid viscosity, and of the membrane mechanical properties. The two situations in which a bending rigidity and a shear…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
Microorganisms such as bacteria often swim in fluid environments that cannot be classified as Newtonian. Many biological fluids contain polymers or other heterogeneities which may yield complex rheology. For a given set of boundary…
The nonequilibrium structural and dynamical properties of semiflexible active polar polymers subject to linear flow are studied by numerical simulations. Filaments are confined in two dimensions and immersed in a fluid described by the…
The shear rheology of dense colloidal and granular suspensions is strongly nonlinear, as these materials exhibit shear-thinning and shear-thickening, depending on multiple physical parameters. We numerically study the rheology of a simple…
With a detail microscopic model for a self-propelled swimmer, we derive the rheological properties of a dilute suspension of such particles at small Peclet numbers. It is shown that, in addition to the Einstein's like contribution to the…
Nonlinearities in constitutive equations of extended objects in shear flow lead to novel phenomena, {\it e.g.} "rheochaos" in solutions of wormlike micelles and "elastic turbulence" in polymer solutions. Since both phenomena involve…