Related papers: Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids
The intricate wobbling motion of flagellated bacteria, characterized by the periodic precession of the cell body, is a determinant factor in their motility and navigation within complex fluid environments. While well-studied in quiescent…
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…
Microswimmers typically operate in complex environments. In biological systems, often diverse species are simultaneously present and interact with each other. Here, we derive a (time-dependent) particle-scale statistical description, namely…
In this paper we study swimming of a model organism, the so-called Taylor's swimming sheet, in a viscoelastic fluid close to a solid boundary. This situation comprises natural habitats of many swimming microorganisms, and while previous…
Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…
We study the fluid drift due to a time-dependent dumbbell model of a microswimmer. The model captures important aspects of real microswimmers such as a time-dependent flagellar motion and a no-slip body. The model consists of a rigid sphere…
Active colloids are microscopic particles, which self-propel through viscous fluids by converting energy extracted from their environment into directed motion. We first explain how articial microswimmers move forward by generating…
We review recent work on active colloids or swimmers, such as self-propelled microorganisms, phoretic colloidal particles, and artificial micro-robotic systems, moving in fluid-like environments. These environments can be water-like and…
Hydrodynamic interactions are crucial for determining the cooperative behavior of microswimmers at low Reynolds numbers. Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of the scaling and strength of the interactions in the case of a pair of…
Among several models for microswimmers, the three-sphere microswimmer proposed by Najafi and Golestanian captures the essential mechanism for the locomotion of a microswimmer in a viscous fluid. Owing to its simplicity and flexibility, the…
Microswimming cells and robots exhibit diverse behaviours due to both their swimming and their environment. One of the core environmental features impacting inertialess swimming is background flows. While the influence of select flows,…
The role of passive body dynamics on the kinematics of swimming micro-organisms in complex fluids is investigated. Asymptotic analysis of small amplitude motions of a finite-length undulatory swimmer in a Stokes-Oldroyd-B fluid is used to…
Microscopic active droplets are able to swim autonomously in viscous flows: this puzzling feature stems from solute exchanges with the surrounding fluid via surface reactions or their spontaneous solubilisation, and the interfacial flows…
The motion of a rotating helical body in a viscoelastic fluid is considered. In the case of force-free swimming, the introduction of viscoelasticity can either enhance or retard the swimming speed and locomotive efficiency, depending on the…
The hydrodynamics of a flagellated microorganism is investigated when swimming close to a planar free-slip surface by means of numerical solu- tions of the Stokes equations obtained via a Boundary Element Method. Depending on the initial…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
Micro-scale swimming robots have been envisaged for many medical applications such as targeted drug delivery, where the microrobot will be expected to navigate in a fluid through channels carrying a payload. Alternatively, in many cases,…
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…
Many biological microswimmers locomote by periodically beating the densely-packed cilia on their cell surface in a wave-like fashion. While the swimming mechanisms of ciliated microswimmers have been extensively studied both from the…
Flagella and cilia are cellular appendages that inherit essential functions of microbial life including sensing and navigating the environment. In order to propel a swimming microorganism they displace the surrounding fluid by means of…