Related papers: A note on higher order perturbative corrections to…
Numerous natural processes are contingent on microorganisms' ability to swim through fluids with non-Newtonian rheology. Here, we use the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and tracking methods to experimentally investigate the dynamics…
Swimming, i.e., being able to advance in the absence of external forces by performing cyclic shape changes, is particularly demanding at low Reynolds numbers which is the regime of interest for micro-organisms and micro-robots. We focus on…
Many microorganisms live and evolve in complex fluids. Examples include mammalian spermatozoa in cervical mucus, worms (e.g., \textit{C. elegans}) in wet soil, and bacteria (e.g., \textit{H. pylori}) in our stomach lining. Due to the…
Plane Couette flow of visco-elastic fluids is shown to exhibit a purely elastic subcritical instability in spite of being linearly stable. The mechanism of this instability is proposed and the nonlinear stability analysis of plane Couette…
Translational and rotational swimming at small Reynolds number of a planar assembly of identical spheres immersed in an incompressible viscous fluid is studied on the basis of a set of equations of motion for the individual spheres. The…
Biological swimmers frequently navigate in geometrically restricted media. We study the prescribed-stroke problem of swimmers confined to a planar viscous membrane embedded in a bulk fluid of different viscosity. In their motion,…
When a microorganism begins swimming from rest in a Newtonian fluid such as water, it rapidly attains its steady-state swimming speed since changes in the velocity field spread quickly when the Reynolds number is small. However, swimming…
Anisotropic viscous drag is usually believed to be a requirement for the low Reynolds number locomotion of slender bodies such as flagella and cilia. Here we show that locomotion under isotropic drag is possible for extensible slender…
The dynamics and deformations of immersed flexible fibers are at the heart of important industrial and biological processes, induce peculiar mechanical and transport properties in the fluids that contain them, and are the basis for novel…
Depending on multiple parameters, soft robots can exhibit different modes of locomotion that are difficult to model numerically. As a result, improving their performance is complex, especially in small-scale systems characterized by low…
It has been known for some time that some microorganisms can swim faster in high-viscosity gel-forming polymer solutions. These gel-like media come to mimic highly viscous heterogeneous environment that these microorganisms encounter…
Taylor's swimming sheet is a classical model of microscale propulsion and pumping. Many biological fluids and substances are fibrous, having a preferred direction in their microstructure; for example cervical mucus is formed of polymer…
Self-propelled phoretic swimmers are generally studied in the laminar flow regime, where their low speed renders inertial effects negligible and trajectories highly predictable. This research tackles the challenge of propulsion in the…
This chapter on the rheology of active fluids is an attempt to correlate theoretical and experimental work. A considerable amount of theoretical work and most of the experimental data focus on the rheology of active fluids in a Newtonian…
A three-dimensional model of a low-Reynold's swimmer is introduced and analyzed in this paper. This model consists of two large and small spheres connected by two perpendicular thin rods. The geometry of this system is motivated by the…
We study the dynamics and the statistics of dilute suspensions of gyrotactic swimmers, a model for many aquatic motile microorganisms. By means of extensive numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations at different Reynolds numbers,…
We study the dynamics of gyrotactic microswimmers suspended in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence by using direct numerical simulations (DNS). The swimmers are characterized by three non-dimensional parameters: their aspect ratio…
Swimming microorganisms often have to propel in complex, non-Newtonian fluids. We carry out experiments with self-propelling helical swimmers driven by an externally rotating magnetic field in shear-thinning, inelastic fluids. Similarly to…
Many biological fluids have polymeric microstructures and display non-Newtonian rheology. We take advantage of such nonlinear fluid behavior and combine it with geometrical symmetry-breaking to design a novel small-scale propeller able to…
The problem of optimization of a cycle of tangential deformations of the surface of a spherical object (microsquirmer) self-propelling in a viscous fluid at low Reynolds numbers is represented in a noncanonical Hamiltonian form. The…