Related papers: Front-back asymmetry controls the impact of viscoe…
Most aquatic vertebrates swim by lateral flapping of their bodies and caudal fins. While much effort has been devoted to understanding the flapping kinematics and its influence on the swimming efficiency, little is known about the stability…
Flagellated bacteria exploiting helical propulsion are known to swim along circular trajectories near surfaces. Fluid dynamics predicts this circular motion to be clockwise (CW) above a rigid surface (when viewed from inside the fluid) and…
Controllability results of four models of two-link microscale swimmers that are able to change the length of their links are obtained. The problems are formulated in the framework of Geometric Control Theory, within which the notions of…
It is shown that the dynamics of a two-dimensional crystal with a finite concentration of dislocations, as well as vacancy and interstitial defects, is governed by the hydrodynamic equations of a viscoelastic medium. At the longest length…
Microbial flagellates typically inhabit complex suspensions of polymeric material which can impact the swimming speed of motile microbes, filter-feeding of sessile cells, and the generation of biofilms. There is currently a need to better…
The behavior of flagellated bacteria swimming in non-Newtonian media remains an area with contradictory and conflicting results. We report on the behavior of wild-type and smooth-swimming E. coli in Newtonian, shear thinning and…
Systems of motile microorganisms exhibit a multitude of collective phenomena, including motility-induced phase separation and turbulence. Sensing of the environment and adaptation of movement plays an essential role in the emergent…
We study two microswimmers consisting of a spherical rigid head and a passive elastic tail. In the first one the tail is clamped to the head, and the system oscillates under the action of an external torque. In the second one, head and tail…
Many different microswimmers propel themselves using flagella that beat periodically. The shape of the flagellar beat and swimming speed have been observed to change with fluid rheology. We quantify changes in the flagellar waveforms of…
We introduce and investigate the wellposedness of two models describing the self-propelled motion of a "small bio-mimetic swimmer" in the 2D and 3D incompressible fluids modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations. It is assumed that 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…
We combine experiments with simulations to investigate the fluid-structure interaction of a flexible helical rod rotating in a viscous fluid, under low Reynolds number conditions. Our analysis takes into account the coupling between the…
Synthetic microswimmers mimicking biological movements at the microscale have been developed in recent years. Actuating helical magnetic materials with a homogeneous rotating magnetic field is one of the most widespread techniques for…
Dynamo action owing to helically forced turbulence and large-scale shear is studied using direct numerical simulations. The resulting magnetic field displays propagating wave-like behavior. This behavior can be modelled in terms of an…
We develop a continuum theory of linear viscoelastic response in oriented monodomain nematic elastomers. The expression for dissipation function is analogous to the Leslie-Ericksen version of anisotropic nematic viscosity; we propose the…
Viscoelasticity weakens the asymmetry of laminar shedding flow behind a blunt body in a free domain. In the present study, this finding is confirmed by four unsteady viscoelastic flows with asymmetric flow configuration, i.e., flow over an…
We present numerical simulations of simplified models for swimming organisms or robots, using chordwise flexible elastic plates. We focus on the tip vortices originating from three-dimensional effects due to the finite span of the plate.…
Swimming of a sphere in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations for wave-type distortions of the spherical shape. At sizable values of the dimensionless scale number the mean swimming velocity…
We investigate 3-dimensional flagellar swimming in a fluid with a sparse network of stationary obstacles or fibers. The Brinkman equation is used to model the average fluid flow where a flow-dependent term, including a resistance parameter…
Recent theoretical works exploring the hydrodynamics of soft material in non-equilibrium situations are reviewed. We discuss the role of hydrodynamic interactions for three different systems: i) the deformation and orientation of…