Related papers: Using Experimentally Calibrated Regularized Stokes…
Thiovulum majus, which is one of the fastest known bacteria, swims using hundreds of flagella. Unlike typical pusher cells, which swim in circular paths over hard surfaces, a T. majus cell turns its flagella normal to the surface. To probe…
In a fluid environment, flagellated microswimmers propel themselves by rotating their flagella. The morphology of these flagella significantly influences forward speed, swimming efficiency, and directional stability, which are critical for…
Peritrichous bacteria synchronize and bundle their flagella to actively swim while disruption of the bundle leads to tumbling. It is still not known whether the number of flagella represents an evolutionary adaptation towards optimizing…
Many bacteria are motile by means of one or more rotating rigid helical flagella, making them the only known organism to use rotation as a means of propulsion. The rotation is supplied by the bacterial flagellar motor, a particularly…
Although the motility of the flagellated bacteria, Escherichia coli, has been widely studied, the effect of viscosity on swimming speed remains controversial. The swimming mode of wild-type E.coli is often idealized as a "run-and- tumble"…
Flagellated microswimmers are ubiquitous in natural habitats. Understanding the hydrodynamic behavior of these cells is of paramount interest, owing to their applications in bio-medical engineering and disease spreading. Since the last two…
We remark on the use of regularized Stokeslets in the slender body theory (SBT) approximation of Stokes flow about a thin fiber of radius $\epsilon>0$. Denoting the regularization parameter by $\delta$, we consider regularized SBT based on…
We present a numerical method for computing the single layer (Stokeslet) and double layer (stresslet) integrals in Stokes flow. The method applies to smooth, closed surfaces in three dimensions, and achieves high accuracy both on and near…
The method of regularized stokeslets is a powerful numerical method to solve the Stokes flow equations for problems in biological fluid mechanics. A recent variation of this method incorporates a nearest-neighbor discretization to improve…
The dynamics of geometrically non-linear flexible filaments play an important role in a host of biological processes, from flagella-driven cell transport to the polymeric structure of complex fluids. Such problems have historically been…
Cilia and flagella are self-actuated microtubule-based structures that are present on many cell surfaces, ranging from the outer surface of single-cell organisms to the internal epithelial surfaces in larger animals. A fast and robust…
An interfacial regularized Stokeslet scheme is presented to predict the motion of solid bodies (e.g. proteins or gel-phase domains) embedded within flowing lipid bilayer membranes. The approach provides a numerical route to calculate…
Recent advances in microscopy techniques has uncovered unique aspects of flagella-driven motility in bacteria. A remarkable example is the discovery of flagellar wrapping, a phenomenon whereby a bacterium wraps its flagellum (or flagellar…
Multi-flagellated bacteria utilize the hydrodynamic interaction between their filamentary tails, known as flagella, to swim and change their swimming direction in low Reynolds number flow. This interaction, referred to as bundling and…
Randomly moving active particles can be herded into directed motion by asymmetric geometric structures. Although such a rectification process has been extensively studied due to its fundamental, biological, and technological relevance, a…
For a sperm cell-like flagellated swimmer in an unbounded domain, several numerical models of different fidelity are considered based on the Stokes flow approximation. The models include a Regularised Stokeslet Method and a 3D Finite…
Many types of bacteria swim by rotating a bundle of helical filaments also called flagella. Each filament is driven by a rotary motor and a very flexible hook transmits the motor torque to the filament. We model it by discretizing…
The bundling of flagella is known to create a "run" phase, where the bacteria moves in a nearly straight line rather than making changes in direction. Historically, mechanical explanations for the bundling phenomenon intrigued many…
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…
In this paper we are interested in optimizing the shape of multi-flagellated helical microswimmers. Mimicking the propagation of helical waves along the flagella, they self-propel by rotating their tails. The swimmer's dynamics is computed…