Related papers: Stability of dancing Volvox
We develop a numerical framework to simulate the locomotion of a flagellated bacterium with a spheroidal head (such as Escherichia coli) in biological fluids like mucus, which are entangled polymer solutions exhibiting elasto-viscoplastic…
Geometric confinement plays an important role in the dynamics of natural and synthetic microswimmers from bacterial cells to self-propelled particles in high-throughput microfluidic devices. However, little is known about the effects of…
Flocking behavior is observed in biological systems from the cellular to super-organismal length scales, and the mechanisms and purposes of this behavior are objects of intense interest. In this paper, we study the collective dynamics of…
How fast must an oriented collection of extensile swimmers swim to escape the instability of viscous active suspensions? We show that the answer lies in the dimensionless combination $R=\rho v_0^2/2\sigma_a$, where $\rho$ is the suspension…
Slicks are thin viscous films that can be found at the air--water interface of water bodies such as lakes, rivers and oceans. These micro-layers are enriched in surfactants, organic matter, and microorganisms, and exhibit steep physical and…
Collinear velocity relaxation of two spheres immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of an approximate expression for the retarded hydrodynamic interaction. After a sudden impulse applied to one sphere, the other…
Liquid films coating vertical cylinders can form annular liquid collars which translate downwards under gravity. We investigate the dynamics of a thin viscoplastic liquid film coating the interior or exterior of a vertical cylindrical tube,…
We discuss a two-dimensional model for the dynamics of axonemal deformations driven by internally generated forces of molecular motors. Our model consists of an elastic filament pair connected by active elements. We derive the dynamic…
The quest for designing new self-propelled colloids is fuelled by the demand for simple experimental models to study the collective behaviour of their more complex natural counterparts. Most synthetic self-propelled particles move by…
Green algae of the $Volvocine$ lineage, spanning from unicellular $Chlamydomonas$ to vastly larger $Volvox$, are models for the study of the evolution of multicellularity, flagellar dynamics, and developmental processes. Phototactic…
The dynamics of periodic swimming is studied for two models of a deformable sphere, the dipole-quadrupole model and the quadrupole-octupole model. For the two models the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations can be found exactly to second…
We study the behaviour of a thin fluid filament (a rivulet) flowing in an air-filled Hele-Shaw cell. Transverse and longitudinal deformations can propagate on this rivulet, although both are linearly attenuated in the parameter range we…
Many species of fish, as well as biorobotic underwater vehicles, employ body caudal fin propulsion, in which a wave-like body motion culminates in high-amplitude caudal fin oscillations to generate thrust. This study uses high fidelity…
Microorganisms such as algae and bacteria move in a viscous environment with extremely low Reynolds ($Re$), where the viscous drag dominates the inertial forces. They have adapted to this environment by developing specialized features such…
The motion of several plates in an inviscid and incompressible fluid is studied numerically using a vortex sheet model. Two to four plates are initially placed in-line, separated by a specified distance, and actuated in the vertical…
Low Reynolds number swimmers frequently move near boundaries, such as spirochetes moving through porous tissues and sperm navigating the reproductive tract. Furthermore, these microorganisms must often navigate non-Newtonian fluids such as…
Studies of particle motion in vortical flows have mainly focused on point-like particles, either inertial or self-propelled. This approximation assumes that the velocity field that surrounds the particle is linear. We consider an…
A thring is a recent addition to the zoo of spiral wave phenomena found in excitable media and consists of a scroll ring that is threaded by a pair of counter-rotating scroll waves. This arrangement behaves like a particle that swims…
A concentrated, vertical monolayer of identical spherical squirmers, which may be bottom-heavy, and which are subjected to a linear shear flow, is modelled computationally by two different methods: Stokesian dynamics, and a…
We present an experimental study of the statistical properties of millimeter-size spheres floating on the surface of a turbulent flow. The flow is generated in a layer of liquid metal by an electromagnetic forcing. By using two magnet…