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The motion of flexible fibers through structured fluidic environments is ubiquitous in nature and industrial applications. Most often, their dynamics results from the complex interplay between internal elastic stresses, contact forces and…
Wormlike micelle (WLM) solutions are abundant in energy, environmental, and industrial applications, which often rely on their flow through tortuous channels. How does the interplay between fluid rheology and channel geometry influence the…
We examine the motion of rigid, ellipsoidal swimmers subjected to a steady vortex flow in two dimensions. Numerical simulations of swimmers in a spatially periodic array of vortices reveal a range of possible behaviors, including trapping…
We investigate the dynamics of an oscillatory boundary layer developing over a bed of collisional and freely evolving sediment grains. We perform Euler-Lagrange simulations at Reynolds numbers $\mathrm{Re}_\delta= 200$, 400, and 800,…
Collective motion is a phenomenon observed across length scales in nature, from bacterial swarming and tissue migration to the flocking of animals. The mechanisms underlying this behavior vary significantly depending on the biological…
Thin cylindrical membranes arise in a wide variety of biological systems ranging from tubular structures on and within cell membranes to in-vitro experiments on artificial vesicles. Motor proteins embedded in such fluidic membranes often…
Run-and-tumble dynamics is a wide-spread mechanism of swimming bacteria. The accumulation of run-and-tumble microswimmers near impermeable surfaces is studied theoretically and numerically in the low-density limit in two and three spatial…
Motion of an object near a soft wall with intervening fluid is a canonical problem in elastohydrodynamics, finding presence in subjects spanning biology to tribology. Particularly, motion of a sphere towards a soft substrate with…
Understanding the penetration dynamics of intruders in granular beds is relevant not only for fundamental physics, but also for geophysical processes and construction on sediments or granular soils in areas potentially affected by…
Free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a powerful genetic model, essential for investigations ranging from behavior to neuroscience to aging, and locomotion is a key observable used in these studies. However, despite the fact that…
Much of the Earth and many surfaces of extraterrestrial bodies are composed of in-cohesive particle matter. Locomoting on granular terrain is challenging for common robotic devices, either wheeled or legged. In this work, we discover a…
Fish perform various propulsive maneuvers while swimming by generating traveling waves along their bodies and producing thrust through tail strokes. Anguilliform swimmers spread motion along the body, while carangiform swimmers' motion is…
We study the kinematics and dynamics of a highly compliant membrane disk placed head-on in a uniform flow. With increasing flow velocity, the membrane deforms nonlinearly into increasingly parachute-like shapes. These aerodynamically…
Efficient locomotion is important for the evolution of complex life, yet the physical principles selecting specific swimming strokes often remain entangled with biological constraints. In viscous fluids, the scallop theorem constrains the…
Limbless organisms such as snakes can navigate nearly all terrain. In particular, desert-dwelling sidewinder rattlesnakes (Crotalus cerastes) operate effectively on inclined granular media (such as sand dunes) that induce failure in…
We develop a numerical framework to simulate the locomotion of a flagellated bacterium with a spheroidal head (such as Escherichia coli) in biological fluids like mucus, which are entangled polymer solutions exhibiting elasto-viscoplastic…
We study propulsion arising from microscopic colloidal rotors dynamically assembled and driven in a viscous fluid upon application of an elliptically polarized rotating magnetic field. Close to a confining plate, the motion of this…
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and technology. They inhabit diverse environments ranging from small river tributaries and lakes to oceans, as well as wastewater treatment plants and food manufacturing. In many of these…
We study the dynamics of knotted deformable closed chains sedimenting in a viscous fluid. We show experimentally that trefoil and other torus knots often attain a remarkably regular horizontal toroidal structure while sedimenting, with a…
In nature, limbless locomotion is adopted by a wide range of organisms at various length scales. Interestingly, undulatory, crawling and inching/looping gait constitutes a fundamental class of limbless locomotion and is often observed in…