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Crowd movements are observed among different species and on different scales, from insects to mammals, as well as in non-cognitive systems, such as motile cells. When forced to escape through a narrow opening, most terrestrial animals…
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…
E. M. Purcell showed that a body has to perform non-reciprocal motion in order to propel itself in a highly viscous environment. The swimmer with one degree of freedom is bound to do reciprocal motion, whereby the center of mass of the…
This paper explores the fluid-elastic response of a cantilevered flexible sheet in the presence of uniform airflow. The leading edge of the sheet is clamped, while at the trailing edge, in-plane tension is applied to provide additional…
We measure the reliability of signals at three levels within the blowfly visual system, and present a theoretical framework for analyzing the experimental results, starting from the Poisson process. We find that blowfly photoreceptors, up…
Soft underwater robots typically explore bioinspired designs at the expense of power efficiency when compared to traditional underwater robots, which limits their practical use in real-world applications. We leverage a fluidic closed-loop…
Self-organized dynamic patterns in dense active matter are striking manifestations of non-equilibrium physics. A prominent example is the macroscopic elliptical motion observed in quasi-2D bacterial suspensions, which has lacked a physical…
A high fidelity model is developed for an elastic string pendulum, one end of which is attached to a rigid body while the other end is attached to an inertially fixed reel mechanism which allows the unstretched length of the string to be…
Fish swim by undulating their bodies. These propulsive motions require coordinated shape changes of a body that interacts with its fluid environment, but the specific shape coordination that leads to robust turning and swimming motions…
A systematic study is carried out on a fully resolved fluid-particle model which couples the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) and the Discrete Element Method (DEM) using an immersed moving boundary technique. Similar algorithms have been…
In this paper we study the locomotion of a shape-changing body swimming in a two-dimensional perfect fluid of infinite extent. The shape-changes are prescribed as functions of time satisfying constraints ensuring that they result from the…
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…
Modeling and controlling fluid flows is critical for several fields of science and engineering, including transportation, energy, and medicine. Effective flow control can lead to, e.g., lift increase, drag reduction, mixing enhancement, and…
We use particle simulations to reveal two distinct propulsion mechanisms for a scallop-like swimmer to locomote itself in granular media by reciprocally flapping its wings. Based on the discrete element method, we examine the kinematics and…
It has been a long-standing problem how schooling fish optimize their motion by exploiting the vortices shed by the others. A recent experimental study showed that a pair of fish reduce energy consumption by matching the phases of their…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
We investigate the role of resonance in finite-amplitude swimming of a flexible flat plate in a viscous fluid. The role of resonance in performance remains unclear for two reasons: i) a lack of definition of resonance for the fully-coupled…
Locomotion in Stokes flow is an intensively-studied problem because it describes important biological phenomena such as the motility of many species' sperm, bacteria, algae and protozoa. Numerical computations can be challenging,…
Viscous streaming is an efficient rectification mechanism to exploit flow inertia at small scales for fluid and particle manipulation. It typically entails a fluid vibrating around an immersed solid feature that, by concentrating stresses,…
In this article, we are interested in studying locomotion strategies for a class of shape-changing bodies swimming in a fluid. This class consists of swimmers subject to a particular linear dynamics, which includes the two most investigated…