Related papers: Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids
Despite their importance in many biological, ecological and physical processes, microorganismal fluid flows under tight confinement have not been investigated experimentally. Strong screening of Stokelets in this geometry suggests that the…
Typical bodily and environmental fluids encountered by biological swimmers consist of dissolved macromolecules such as proteins and polymers, often rendering them non Newtonian. To mimic such scenarios, we investigate the motion of swimming…
We propose and analyze a simple model for the evolution of an immersed, inextensible filament which incorporates linear viscoelastic effects of the surrounding fluid. The model is a closed-form system of equations along the curve only which…
Microswimmers often use chirality to generate translational movement from rotation motion, exhibiting distinct behaviors in complex fluids compared to simple Newtonian fluids. However, the underlying mechanism remains incompletely…
Microorganisms such as bacteria often swim in fluid environments that cannot be classified as Newtonian. Many biological fluids contain polymers or other heterogeneities which may yield complex rheology. For a given set of boundary…
The motility of microorganisms is influenced greatly by their hydrodynamic interactions with the fluidic environment they inhabit. We show by direct experimental observation of the bi-flagellated alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that fluid…
Many bacteria live in natural and clinical environments with abundant macromolecular polymers. Macromolecular fluids commonly display viscoelasticity and non-Newtonian rheological behavior; it is unclear how these complex-fluid properties…
We derive from first principles a three-dimensional theory of self-propelled particle swarming in a viscous fluid environment. Our model predicts emergent collective behavior that depends critically on fluid opacity, mechanism of…
Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…
Many microorganisms swim in a highly heterogeneous environment with obstacles such as fibers or polymers. To better understand how this environment affects microorganism swimming, we study propulsion of a cylinder or filament in a fluid…
Microorganisms such as algae and bacteria move in a viscous environment with extremely low Reynolds ($Re$), where the viscous drag dominates the inertial forces. They have adapted to this environment by developing specialized features such…
The electroosmotic flow of non-Newtonian fluids in deformable microchannels is fundamentally important in the understanding of the hydrodynamics in physiological flows. The performance of these microchannels is governed by the load bearing…
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…
Most classical work on the hydrodynamics of low-Reynolds-number swimming addresses deterministic locomotion in quiescent environments. Thermal fluctuations in fluids are known to lead to a Brownian loss of the swimming direction. As most…
Microorganisms and synthetic microswimmers often encounter complex environments consisting of networks of obstacles embedded into viscous fluids. Such settings include biological media, such as mucus with filamentous networks, as well as…
Bacteria exist in a free-swimming state or in a sessile biofilm state. The transition from free-swimming to sessile mode is characterized by changes in gene expression which alter, among others,the mechanics of flagellar motility. In this…
We discuss the locomotion of a three-sphere microswimmer in a viscoelastic structured fluid characterized by typical length and time scales. We derive a general expression to link the average swimming velocity to the sphere mobilities. In…
Active swimmers are ubiquitous in nature, found in many diverse biological systems ranging from bacteria to vertebrate fish. Of particular importance are sperm cells which are swimmers that are crucial for the survival of many species…
Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in the biological world and strongly affect the stability, topology, and transport properties of active suspensions in viscous flow. Based on a far-field analytical model, the…
The self-propelled motion of microscopic bodies immersed in a fluid medium is studied using molecular dynamics simulation. The advantage of the atomistic approach is that the detailed level of description allows complete freedom in…