Related papers: Reciprocal microswimmers in a viscoelastic fluid
Synthetic microswimmers show great promise in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery. Their locomotion, however, is subject to stringent constraints due to the dominance of viscous over inertial forces at low…
Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…
Biological microswimmers are known to navigate upstream of an external flow (positive rheotaxis) in trajectories ranging from linear, spiral to oscillatory. Such rheotaxis stems from the interplay between the motion and complex shapes of…
We computationally study the kinematics of a simple model reciprocal swimmer (asymmetric dumbbell) as a function of the Reynolds number (Re) and investigate how the onset and gradual increase of inertia impacts the swimming behavior: a…
We investigate the hydrodynamic interactions between microorganisms swimming at low Reynolds number. By considering simple model swimmers, and combining analytic and numerical approaches, we investigate the time-averaged flow field around a…
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,…
The Lorentz reciprocal theorem -- that is used to study various transport phenomena in hydrodynamics -- is violated in chiral active fluids that feature odd viscosity with broken time-reversal and parity symmetries. Here we show that the…
The swimming of a deformable planar slab in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. A continuum of plane wave displacements, symmetric on both sides of the slab and characterized by a…
An axisymmetric squirmer in a Bingham viscoplastic fluid is studied numerically to determine the effect of a yield stress environment on locomotion. The nonlinearity of the governing equations necessitates numerical methods, which is…
Biological microswimmers often encounter deformable boundaries in physiological conditions; for instance, the viscoelastic walls of reproductive tract during migration of spermatozoa, or host tissue during early bacterial biofilm formation.…
There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…
Motivated by the swimming of sperm in the non-Newtonian fluids of the female mammalian reproductive tract, we examine the swimming of filaments in the nonlinear viscoelastic Upper Convected Maxwell model. We obtain the swimming velocity and…
We determine both the in-plane and out-of-plane dynamics of viscoelastic membranes separating two viscous fluids in order to understand microrheological studies of such membranes. We demonstrate the general viscoelastic signatures in the…
Microswimmers display an intriguing ability to navigate through fluids with spatially varying viscosity, a behavior known as viscotaxis, which plays a crucial role in guiding their motion. In this study, we reveal that the orientation…
We propose a very simple one-dimensional swimmer consisting of three spheres that are linked by rigid rods whose lengths can change between two values. With a periodic motion in a non-reciprocal fashion, which breaks the time-reversal…
In the study of microscopic flows, self-propulsion has been particularly topical in recent years, with the rise of miniature artificial swimmers as a new tool for flow control, low Reynolds number mixing, micromanipulation or even drug…
A conformation space kinetic model is constructed to drive the deformation cycle of a three-sphere swimmer to achieve propulsion at low Reynolds number. We analyze the effect of an external load on the performance of this kinetic swimmer,…
We study the three-dimensional dynamics of a spherical microswimmer in cylindrical Poiseuille flow which can be mapped onto a Hamiltonian system. Swinging and tumbling trajectories are identified. In 2D they are equivalent to oscillating…
We employ three numerical methods to explore the motion of low Reynolds number swimmers, modeling the hydrodynamic interactions by means of the Oseen tensor approximation, lattice Boltzmann simulations and multiparticle collision dynamics.…
Swimming of a sphere in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations for wave-type distortions of the spherical shape. At sizable values of the dimensionless scale number the mean swimming velocity…