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Swimming organisms can escape their predators by creating and harnessing unsteady flow fields through their body motions. Stochastic optimization and flow simulations have identified escape patterns that are consistent with those observed…
A swimming microorganism stirs the surrounding fluid, creating a flow field that governs not only its locomotion and nutrient uptake, but also its interactions with other microorganisms and the environment. Despite its fundamental…
Hydrodynamical interactions of active micro-particles are pervasive in our planet's fluid environments. Hence, understanding the interactions of these self-propelled particles is essential for science and engineering. In this paper the…
Research on untethered micro-swimming robots is growing fast owing to their potential impact on minimally invasive medical procedures. Candidate propulsion mechanisms of robots are based on flagellar mechanisms of microorganisms such as…
In this work, we develop a computational framework that aims at simultaneously optimizing the shape and the slip velocity of an axisymmetric microswimmer suspended in a viscous fluid. We consider shapes of a given reduced volume that…
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…
Swimming microorganisms create flows that influence their mutual interactions and modify the rheology of their suspensions. While extensively studied theoretically, these flows have not been measured in detail around any freely-swimming…
In this study we investigated the capabilities of the mesh-free, Lagrangian particle method (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, SPH) to simulate the detailed hydrodynamic processes generated by both spilling and plunging breaking waves within…
One of the principal mechanisms by which surfaces and interfaces affect microbial life is by perturbing the hydrodynamic flows generated by swimming. By summing a recursive series of image systems we derive a numerically tractable…
The role of passive body dynamics on the kinematics of swimming micro-organisms in complex fluids is investigated. Asymptotic analysis of small amplitude motions of a finite-length undulatory swimmer in a Stokes-Oldroyd-B fluid is used to…
A novel model of the wake of swimming fish is developed and incorporated into a dynamical model of a fish school to explore the effect of hydrodynamics on the emergent behavior in schooling fish. The model incorporates well-established…
For a sperm cell-like flagellated swimmer in an unbounded domain, several numerical models of different fidelity are considered based on the Stokes flow approximation. The models include a Regularised Stokeslet Method and a 3D Finite…
Inspired by the classical Kepler and Rutherford problem, we investigate an analogous set-up in the context of active microswimmers: the behavior of a deformable microswimmer in a swirl flow. First we identify new steady bound states in the…
We study the fluid dynamics of two fish-like bodies with synchronised swimming patterns. Our studies are based on two-dimensional simulations of viscous incompressible flows. We distinguish between motion patterns that are externally…
To explore and react to their environment, living micro-swimmers have developed sophisticated strategies for locomotion - in particular, motility with multiple gaits. To understand the physical principles associated with such a behavioural…
The unicellular microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is widely recognized as a premier model living microswimmer for physicists and biophysicists. However, the interest around C. reinhardtii goes beyond its swimming capabilities. In fact,…
The hydrodynamics of a flagellated microorganism is investigated when swimming close to a planar free-slip surface by means of numerical solu- tions of the Stokes equations obtained via a Boundary Element Method. Depending on the initial…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often self-propel in external flows of vortical nature; relevant examples include algae in small-scale ocean eddies, spermatozoa in uterine peristaltic flows and bacteria in microfluidic devices. A…
Self-propelled phoretic swimmers are generally studied in the laminar flow regime, where their low speed renders inertial effects negligible and trajectories highly predictable. This research tackles the challenge of propulsion in the…
We propose a combined analytical-numerical strategy to predict the dynamics and trajectory of a microswimmer next to a curved spherical obstacle. The microswimmer is actuated by a slip velocity on its surface and a uniformly valid solution…