Related papers: Autonomous elastic microswimmer
Microswimmers are encountered in a wide variety of biophysical settings. When interacting with flow fields, they show interesting dynamical features such as trapping, clustering, and preferential orientation. One important step towards the…
Active turbulence is a paradigmatic and fascinating example of self-organized motion at large scales occurring in active matter. We employ massive hydrodynamic simulations of suspensions of resolved model microswimmers to tackle the…
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.…
Swimming micro-organisms such as flagellated bacteria and sperm cells have fascinating locomotion capabilities. Inspired by their natural motion, there is an ongoing effort to develop artificial robotic nano-swimmers for potential in-body…
Symmetry breaking is essential for biological microswimmers to achieve locomotion in viscous environments. Such asymmetry in the swimming mechanism enables the generation of directional forces that overcome fluid resistance, leading to…
We analyse the effect of confining rigid and elastic boundaries on the motility of a model dipolar microswimmer. Flexible boundaries are deformed by the velocity field of the swimmer in such a way that the motility of both extensile and…
External forces acting on a microswimmer can feed back on its self-propulsion mechanism. We discuss this load response for a generic microswimmer that swims by cyclic shape changes. We show that the change in cycle frequency is proportional…
It has long been known that some microswimmers seem to swim counter-intuitively faster when the viscosity of the surrounding fluid is increased, whereas others slow down. This conflicting dependence of the swimming velocity on the viscosity…
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…
We address the problem of controlling a dynamical system governing the motion of a 3D weighted shape changing body swimming in a perfect fluid. The rigid displacement of the swimmer results from the exchange of momentum between prescribed…
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…
In a recent letter (Friedrich et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109:138102, 2012), a minimal model swimmer was proposed that propels itself at low Reynolds numbers by a revolving motion of a pair of spheres. The motion of the two spheres can…
The field of active matter in general and microswimming in particular has experienced a rapid and ongoing expansion over the last decade. A particular interesting aspect is provided by artificial autonomous microswimmers constructed from…
Microswimmers, especially in theoretical treatments, are generally taken to be completely inertia-free, since inertial effects on their motion are typically small and assuming their absence simplifies the problem considerably. Yet in nature…
We investigate a self-organized swimmer at low Reynolds numbers. The microscopic swimmer is composed of three spheres that are connected by two identical active linker arms. Each linker arm contains molecular motors and elastic elements and…
The aim of this paper is to derive an analytical expression for the self-propulsion velocity of a micro-swimmer that consists of N spheres moving along a fixed line. The spheres are linked to each other by the rods of the prescribed lengths…
We consider a swimmer consisting of a collinear assembly of three spheres connected by two slender rods. This swimmer can propel itself forward by varying the lengths of the rods in a way that is not invariant under time reversal. Although…
Microswimmers are exposed in nature to crowded environments and their transport properties depend in a subtle way on the interaction with obstacles. Here, we investigate a model for a single ideal circle swimmer exploring a two-dimensional…
We present a detailed numerical study of a microscopic artificial swimmer realized recently by Dreyfus et al. in experiments [R. Dreyfus et al., Nature 437, 862 (2005)]. It consists of an elastic filament composed of superparamagnetic…
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…