Related papers: Reciprocal microswimmers in a viscoelastic fluid

We use the Deep Q-Network with reinforcement learning to investigate the emergence of odd elasticity in an elastic microswimmer model. For an elastic microswimmer, it is challenging to obtain the optimized dynamics due to the intricate…

Marine plankton are usually modeled as settling elongated micro-swimmers. For the first time, we consider the torque induced by fluid inertia on such swimmers, and we discover that they spontaneously swim in the direction opposite to…

In biological systems, microswimmers often propel themselves through complex media. However, many aspects of swimming mechanisms in non-Newtonian fluids remain unclear. This study considers the propulsion of two types of single spherical…

We use confocal microscopy to directly visualize the spatial fluctuations in fluid flow through a three-dimensional porous medium. We find that the velocity magnitudes and the velocity components both along and transverse to the imposed…

Motivated by recent advances in vesicle engineering, we consider theoretically the locomotion of shape-changing bilayer vesicles at low Reynolds number. By modulating their volume and membrane composition, the vesicles can be made to change…

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…

We experimentally study the motion of light-activated colloidal microswimmers in a viscoelastic fluid. We find that, in such a non-Newtonian environment, the active colloids undergo an unexpected transition from enhanced angular diffusion…

Most classical work on the hydrodynamics of low-Reynolds-number swimming addresses deterministic locomotion in quiescent environments. Thermal fluctuations in fluids are known to lead to a Brownian loss of the swimming direction. As most…

We investigate the dynamics of model microswimmers under confinement, in cylindrical geometries, by means of three dimensional direct numerical calculations with fully resolved hydrodynamics. Such swimmers are known to show collective…

We study theoretically the viscoelastic properties of sheared binary fluids that have strong dynamical asymmetry between the two components. The dynamical asymmetry arises due to asymmetry between the viscoelastic stresses, particularly the…

We obtain a numerical solution for the synchronous motion of two spheres moving in viscous fluid. We find that for a given amount of work performed, the final distance travelled by each sphere is increased by the presence of the other…

Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion depending on the environment in which they find themselves. One mode is swimming by blebbing or other shape changes, and in this paper we analyze a class of…

Microswimming cells and robots exhibit diverse behaviours due to both their swimming and their environment. One of the core environmental features impacting inertialess swimming is background flows. While the influence of select flows,…

Understanding swimming in soft yielding media is challenging due to their complex deformation response to the swimmer's motion. We experimentally show that a scallop-inspired swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings generates locomotion in…

Many microorganisms take a chiral path while swimming in an ambient uid. In this paper, we study the combined behavior of two chiral swimmers using the well-known squirmer model taking into account chiral asymmetries. In contrast to the…

Due to the kinematic reversibility of Stokes flow, a body executing a reciprocal motion (a motion in which the sequence of body configurations remains identical under time reversal) cannot propel itself in a viscous fluid in the limit of…

The problem of optimal microscopic swimming in a noisy environment is analyzed. A simplified model in which propulsion is generated by the relative motion of three spheres connected by immaterial links has been considered. We show that an…

Microswimmers are active particles of microscopic size that self-propel by setting the surrounding fluid into motion. According to the kind of far-field fluid flow that they induce, they are classified into pushers and pullers. Many studies…

We use a three-bead-spring model to investigate the dynamics of bi-flagellate micro-swimmers near a surface. While the primary dynamics and scattering are governed by geometric-dependent direct contact, the fluid flows generated by the…

Velocity relaxation of a spherically symmetric polymer, immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid, and after a sudden small impulse or a sudden twist from a state of rest, is studied on the basis of the linearized Navier-Stokes equations…