Related papers: Transport barriers to self-propelled particles in …
Incorporating the inherent heterogeneity of living systems into models of active nematics is essential to provide a more realistic description of biological processes such as bacterial growth, cell dynamics and tissue development.…
Inspired by small intestine motility, we investigate the flow induced by a propagating pendular-wave along the walls of a channel lined with rigid, villi-like microstructures. The villi undergo harmonic axial oscillations with a phase lag…
We demonstrate with experiments and simulations how microscopic self-propelled particles navigate through environments presenting complex spatial features, which mimic the conditions inside cells, living organisms and future lab-on-a-chip…
Recent work has identified objective (frame-indifferent) material barriers that inhibit the transport of dynamically active vectorial quantities (such as linear momentum, angular momentum and vorticity) in Navier-Stokes flows. In…
Swimming cells often have to self-propel through fluids displaying non-Newtonian rheology. While past theoretical work seems to indicate that stresses arising from complex fluids should systematically hinder low-Reynolds number locomotion,…
Cooperative motion in biological microswimmers is crucial for their survival as it facilitates adhesion to surfaces, formation of hierarchical colonies, efficient motion, and enhanced access to nutrients. Synthetic microswimmers currently…
To make progress towards the development of a theory on the motion of inclusions in thin structured films and membranes, we here consider as an initial step a circular disk in a two-dimensional, uniaxially anisotropic fluid layer. We assume…
Suspensions of swimming micro-organisms are known to undergo intricate collective dynamics as a result of hydrodynamic and collision interactions. Micro-swimmers, such as bacteria and micro-algae, naturally live and have evolved in complex…
Microorganisms swimming through viscous fluids imprint their propulsion mechanisms in the flow fields they generate. Extreme confinement of these swimmers between rigid boundaries often arises in natural and technological contexts, yet…
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…
Understanding the transport properties of microorganisms and self-propelled particles in porous media has important implications for human health as well as microbial ecology. In free space, most microswimmers perform diffusive random walks…
Transport of material across liquid interfaces is ubiquitous for living cells and is also a crucial step in drug delivery and in many industrial processes. The fluids that are present on either side of the interfaces will usually have…
In Stokes flow, Purcell's scallop theorem forbids objects with time-reversible (reciprocal) swimming strokes from moving. In the presence of inertia, this restriction is eased and reciprocally deforming bodies can swim. A number of recent…
Locomotion and transport of microorganisms in fluids is an essential aspect of life. Search for food, orientation toward light, spreading of off-spring, and the formation of colonies are only possible due to locomotion. Swimming at the…
Our recent work identifies material surfaces in incompressible flows that extremize the transport of an arbitrary, weakly diffusive scalar field relative to neighboring surfaces. Such barriers and enhancers of transport can be located…
Self-propelled particles move along circles rather than along a straight line when their driving force does not coincide with their propagation direction. Examples include confined bacteria and spermatozoa, catalytically driven nanorods,…
Many active biological particles, such as swimming microorganisms or motor-proteins, do work on their environment by going though a periodic sequence of shapes. Interactions between particles can lead to the phase-synchronization of their…
This sequence of fluid dynamics videos illustrates the behavior of a suspension of noncolloidal particles flowing past various bluff body obstacles within a microfluidic device. The polystyrene particles, of 7 {\mu}m diameter and volume…
Water molecules confined between biological membranes exhibit a distinctive non-Gaussian displacement distribution, far different from bulk water. Here, we introduce a new transport equation for water molecules in the intermembrane space,…
Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in soft matter systems and in particular significantly alter the dynamics of swimming microorganisms in viscous media. Surface-related effects on the motility of microswimmers can lead to…