Related papers: Optimal swimmer can be puller, pusher, or neutral …
Navigation in turbulent environments is a fundamental challenge for biological and artificial microswimmers. While most existing studies focus on adapting motility or steering, the role of active morphological changes in navigation remains…
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…
The flow field created by swimming microorganisms not only enables their locomotion but also leads to advective transport of nutrients. In this paper we address analytically and computationally the link between unsteady feeding and unsteady…
The swimming of a pair of spherical bladders that change their volumes and mutual distance is efficient at low Reynolds numbers and is superior to other models of artificial swimmers. The change of shape resembles the wriggling motion known…
The possibility of microscopic swimming by extraction of energy from an external flow is discussed, focusing on the migration of a simple trimer across a linear shear flow. The geometric properties of swimming, together with the possible…
We study the properties of arbitrary micro-swimmers towing a passive load through a viscous liquid. The simple close-form expression for the dragging efficiency of a general micro-swimmer dragging a distant load is found, and the leading…
Swimming by shape changes at low Reynolds number is widely used in biology and understanding how the efficiency of movement depends on the geometric pattern of shape changes is important to understand swimming of microorganisms and in…
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…
In this article, we are interested in studying locomotion strategies for a class of shape-changing bodies swimming in a fluid. This class consists of swimmers subject to a particular linear dynamics, which includes the two most investigated…
Synthetic microswimmers show great promise in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery. Their locomotion, however, is subject to stringent constraints due to the dominance of viscous over inertial forces at low…
We apply a reinforcement learning algorithm to show how smart particles can learn approximately optimal strategies to navigate in complex flows. In this paper we consider microswimmers in a paradigmatic three-dimensional case given by a…
Natural swimmers rely for their survival on sensors that gather information from the environment and guide their actions. The spatial organization of these sensors, such as the visual fish system and lateral line, suggests evolutionary…
The majority of studies on self-propelled particles and microswimmers concentrates on objects that do not feature a deterministic bending of their trajectory. However, perfect axial symmetry is hardly found in reality, and shape-asymmetric…
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…
We present an automated procedure for the design of optimal actuation for flagellar magnetic microswimmers based on numerical optimization. Using this method, a new magnetic actuation method is provided which allows these devices to swim…
Swimming velocity and rate of dissipation of a sphere with surface distortions are discussed on the basis of the Stokes equations of low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. At first the surface distortions are assumed to cause an irrotational…
The controllability of a fully three-dimensional $N$-link swimmer is studied. After deriving the equations of motion in a low Reynolds number fluid by means of Resistive Force Theory, the controllability of the minimal $2$-link swimmer is…
The connection between swimming and control theory is attracting increasing attention in the recent literature. Starting from an idea of Alberto Bressan [7] we study the system of a planar body whose position and shape are described by a…
We investigate the behavior of a treadmilling microswimmer in a two-dimensional unbounded domain with a semi-infinite no-slip wall. The wall can also be regarded as a probe or pipette inserted into the flow. We solve the governing evolution…
We study the dynamics of gyrotactic microswimmers suspended in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence by using direct numerical simulations (DNS). The swimmers are characterized by three non-dimensional parameters: their aspect ratio…