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Objects moving in fluids experience patterns of stress on their surfaces determined by their motion and the geometry of nearby boundaries. Fish and underwater robots can use these patterns for navigation. This paper extends this…
Current developments in molecular electronics, motors and chemical sensors could enable constructing large numbers of devices able to sense, compute and act in micron-scale environments. Such microscopic machines, of sizes comparable to…
A finite-element algorithm for computing free-surface flows driven by arbitrary body forces is presented. The algorithm is primarily designed for the microfluidic parameter range where (i) the Reynolds number is small and (ii) force-driven…
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…
Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting in biological tissues on the scale of individual cells, provided they can reach precise locations. This paper evaluates the feasibility of in vivo locomotion…
In this study, we use numerical simulations to investigate the flow field induced by a single magnetic microrobot rotating with a constant angular speed about an axis perpendicular to an underlying surface. A parallel solver for steady…
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 discuss the scaling laws for the flow generated in a viscous fluid by a wave propagating along a solid boundary. This has applications to the displacement of tiny objects on solids, under the effect of progressive surface waves and for…
Inspired by the lotus effect, many studies in the last decade have focused on micro- and nano-patterned surfaces. They revealed that patterns at the micro-scale combined with high contact angles can significantly reduce skin drag. However,…
We review the dynamical behavior of giant fluid vesicles in various types of external hydrodynamic flow. The interplay between stresses arising from membrane elasticity, hydrodynamic flows, and the ever present thermal fluctuations leads to…
Autonomous ocean-exploring vehicles have begun to take advantage of onboard sensor measurements of water properties such as salinity and temperature to locate oceanic features in real time. Such targeted sampling strategies enable more…
Fuel cells using oxygen and glucose could power microscopic robots operating in blood vessels. Swarms of such robots can significantly reduce oxygen concentration, depending on the time between successive transits of the lung, hematocrit…
A wide range of microorganisms, e.g. bacteria, propel themselves by rotation of soft helical tails, also known as flagella. Due to the small size of these organisms, viscous forces overwhelm inertial effects and the flow is at low Reynolds…
The emerging field of deformable microfluidics widely employed in the Lab-on-a-Chip and MEMS communities offers an opportunity to study a relatively under-examined physics. The main objective of this work is to provide a deeper insight into…
The dynamics of the Reynolds stress tensor for turbulent flows is described with an evolution equation coupling both geometric effects and turbulent source terms. The effects of the mean flow geometry are shown up when the source terms are…
We consider extensional flows of a dense layer of spheres in a viscous fluid and employ force and torque balances to determine the trajectory of particle pairs that contribute to the stress. In doing this, we use Stokesian dynamics…
The development of microfluidic devices has recently revived the interest in "old" problems associated with transport at, or across, interfaces. As the characteristic sizes are decreased, the use of pressure gradients to transport fluids…
Lift forces are widespread in hydrodynamics. These are typically observed for big and fast objects, and are often associated with a combination of fluid inertia (i.e. large Reynolds numbers) and specific symmetry-breaking mechanisms. In…
Particles are common in biological and environmental flows and are widely used in industrial and pharmaceutical applications. Their motion and flow dynamics are strongly affected by interactions with the surrounding flow structure. While…
In this work a system for recognizing grasp points in RGB-D images is proposed. This system is intended to be used by a domestic robot when deploying clothes lying at a random position on a table. By taking into consideration that the grasp…