Related papers: Universal optimal geometry of minimal phoretic pum…
Flows enabled by phoretic mechanisms are of significant interest in several biological and biomedical processes, such as bacterial motion and targeted drug delivery. Here, we develop a homogenization-based macroscopic boundary condition…
Small objects can swim by generating around them fields or gradients which in turn induce fluid motion past their surface by phoretic surface effects. We quantify for arbitrary swimmer shapes and surface patterns, how efficient swimming…
Internal phoretic flows due to the interactions of solid boundaries with local chemical gradients may be created using chemical patterning. Alternatively, we demonstrate here that internal flows might also be induced by geometric…
Phoretic swimmers provide new avenues to study non-equilibrium statistical physics and are also hailed as a promising technology for bioengineering at the cellular scale. Exact solutions for the locomotion of such swimmers have been…
Janus particles with the ability to move phoretically in self-generated chemical concentration gradients are model systems for active matter. Their motion typically consists of straight paths with rotational diffusion being the dominant…
Phoretic swimmers are a class of artificial active particles that has received significant attention in recent years. By making use of self-generated gradients (e.g. in temperature, electric potential or some chemical product) phoretic…
Microscopic flows are almost universally linear, laminar and stationary because Reynolds number, $Re$, is usually very small. That impedes mixing in micro-fluidic devices, which sometimes limits their performance. Here we show that truly…
Recent experiments proposed to use confined bacteria in order to generate flows near surfaces. We develop a mathematical and a computational model of this fluid transport using a linear superposition of fundamental flow singularities. The…
This paper presents a computational approach for finding the optimal shapes of peristaltic pumps transporting rigid particles in Stokes flow. In particular, we consider shapes that minimize the rate of energy dissipation while pumping a…
Designing microscopic and nanoscopic self-propelled particles and characterising their motion has become a major scientific challenge over the past decades. To this purpose, phoretic effects, namely propulsion mechanisms relying on local…
Janus phoretic colloids (JPs) self-propel as a result of self-generated chemical gradients and exhibit spontaneous nontrivial dynamics within phoretic suspensions, on length scales much larger than the microscopic swimmer size. Such…
Examples of fluid flows driven by undulating boundaries are found in nature across many different length scales. Even though different driving mechanisms have evolved in distinct environments, they perform essentially the same function:…
Many microfluidic devices use macroscopic pressure differentials to overcome viscous friction and generate flows in microchannels. In this work, we investigate how the chemical and geometric properties of the channel walls can drive a net…
Microfluidics involves the manipulation of flows at the microscale, typically requiring external power sources to generate pressure gradients. Alternatively, harnessing flows from active fluids, which are usually chaotic, has been proposed…
Manipulation of small-scale particles across streamlines is the elementary task of microfluidic devices. Many such devices operate at very low Reynolds numbers and deflect particles using arrays of obstacles, but a systematic quantification…
Quadratic flows have the unique property of uniform strain and are commonly used in turbulence modeling and hydrodynamic analysis. While previous application focused on two-dimensional homogeneous fluid, this study examines the geometric…
Patches of catalyst imprinted on supporting walls induce motion of the fluid around them once they are supplied with the chemical species (``fuel'') that are converted by the catalytic chemical reaction. While the functioning of such…
Micro/Nano motors are micro to nano-sized particles and systems that are capable of motion in fluidic systems. Their motion can be a result of many mechanisms, one of the most well-known of which is electrolyte diffusiophoresis, in which…
Comprehensive understanding of particle motion in microfluidic devices is essential to unlock novel technologies for shape-based separation and sorting of microparticles like microplastics, cells and crystal polymorphs. Such particles…
We show both numerically and analytically that a chemically patterned active pore can act as a micro/nano-pump for fluids, even if it is fore-aft symmetric. This is possible due to a spontaneous symmetry breaking which occurs when advection…