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Peritrichously-flagellated bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, self-propel in fluids by using specialised motors to rotate multiple helical filaments. The rotation of each motor is transmitted to a short flexible segment called the hook…
The propulsion of mammalian spermatozoa relies on the spontaneous periodic oscillation of their flagella. These oscillations are driven internally by the coordinated action of ATP-powered dynein motors that exert sliding forces between…
Sedimentation of a dispersed solid phase is widely encountered in applications and environmental flows, yet little is known about the behavior of finite-size particles in homogeneous isotropic turbulence. To fill this gap, we perform Direct…
When particles settle through a stable temperature or salinity gradient they can drive an instability known as sedimentary fingering convection. This phenomenon is thought to occur beneath sediment-rich river plumes in lakes and oceans, in…
Self-sustained turbulent structures have been observed in a wide range of living fluids, yet no quantitative theory exists to explain their properties. We report experiments on active turbulence in highly concentrated 3D suspensions of…
Undulatory locomotion is common to nematodes as well as to limbless vertebrates, but its control is not understood in spite of the identification of hundred of genes involved in Caenorhabditis elegans locomotion. To reveal the mechanisms of…
A generalized reciprocal theorem is used to relate the force and torque induced on a particle in an inertia-less fluid with small variation in viscosity to integrals involving Stokes flow fields and the spatial dependence of viscosity.…
The study of vesicles in suspension is important to understand the complicated dynamics exhibited by cells in vivo and in vitro. We developed a computer simulation based on the boundary-integral method to model the three dimensional…
Undulatory locomotion, a gait in which thrust is produced in the opposite direction of a traveling wave of body bending, is a common mode of propulsion used by animals in fluids, on land, and even within sand. As such it has been an…
The transport of dense particles by a turbulent flow depends on two dimensionless numbers. Depending on the ratio of the shear velocity of the flow to the settling velocity of the particles (or the Rouse number), sediment transport takes…
The development of multifunctional and biocompatible microrobots for biomedical applications relies on achieving locomotion through viscous fluids. Here, we describe a framework for swimming in homogeneous magnetoelastic membranes composed…
We study the static and dynamic wetting of adaptive substrates using a mesoscopic hydrodynamic model for a liquid droplet on a solid substrate covered by a polymer brush. First, we show that on the macroscale Young's law still holds for the…
The effect of substrate topography on the settlement of coral larvae in wave-driven oscillatory flow is investigated using computational fluid dynamics coupled to a 2D agent-based simulation of individual larvae. Substrate topography…
We report on a series of experiments in which a grain-sized intruder is pushed by a spring through a 2D granular material comprised of photoelastic disks in a Couette geometry. We study the intruder dynamics as a function of packing…
In meandering rivers, interactions between flow, sediment transport, and bed topography affect diverse processes, including bedform development and channel migration. Predicting how these interactions affect the spatial patterns and…
The linear and non-linear dynamic response to an oscillatory shear flow of giant wormlike micelles consisting of Pb-Peo block copolymers is studied by means of Fourier transform rheology. Experiments are performed in the vicinity of the…
The swimming behavior of bacteria and other microorganisms is sensitive to the physical properties of the fluid in which they swim. Mucus, biofilms, and artificial liquid-crystalline solutions are all examples of fluids with some degree of…
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…
The sedimentation of a rigid particle near a wall in a viscous fluid has been studied numerically by many authors, but analytical solutions have been derived only for special cases such as the motion of spherical particles. In this paper…
Many microorganisms swim through gels, materials with nonzero zero-frequency elastic shear modulus, such as mucus. Biological gels are typically heterogeneous, containing both a structural scaffold (network) and a fluid solvent. We analyze…