Related papers: Using Experimentally Calibrated Regularized Stokes…
We study the microscale propulsion of a rotating helical filament confined by a cylindrical tube, using a boundary-element method for Stokes flow that accounts for helical symmetry. We determine the effect of confinement on swimming speed…
Many problems in fluid dynamics are effectively modeled as Stokes flows - slow, viscous flows where the Reynolds number is small. Boundary integral equations are often used to solve these problems, where the fundamental solutions for the…
Geometric confinement plays an important role in the dynamics of natural and synthetic microswimmers from bacterial cells to self-propelled particles in high-throughput microfluidic devices. However, little is known about the effects of…
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…
Hydrodynamics and confinement dominate bacterial mobility near solid or air-water boundaries, causing flagellated bacteria to move in circular trajectories. This phenomenon results from the counter-rotation between the bacterial body and…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
The swimming properties of an E. coli-type model bacterium are investigated by mesoscale hy- drodynamic simulations, combining molecular dynamics simulations of the bacterium with the multiparticle particle collision dynamics method for the…
The run-and-tumble dynamics of bacteria, as exhibited by \textit{E. coli}, offers a simple experimental realization of non-Brownian, yet diffusive, particles. Here we present some analytic and numerical results for models of the ideal…
Stokes flow, discussed by G.G. Stokes in 1851, describes many microscopic biological flow phenomena, including cilia-driven transport and flagellar motility; the need to quantify and understand these flows has motivated decades of…
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…
Within individual bacteria, we combine force-dependent polymerization dynamics of individual MreB protofilaments with an elastic model of protofilament bundles buckled into helical configurations. We use variational techniques and…
A flagellated bacterium navigates fluid environments by rotating its helical flagellar bundle. The wobbling of the bacterial body significantly influences its swimming behavior. To quantify the three underlying motions--precession,…
Most bacteria swim through fluids by rotating helical flagella which can take one of twelve distinct polymorphic shapes. The most common helical waveform is the "normal" form, used during forward swimming runs. To shed light on the…
We propose a time discretization scheme for a class of ordinary differential equations arising in simulations of fluid/particle flows. The scheme is intended to work robustly in the lubrication regime when the distance between two particles…
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…
Motivated by recent advances in vesicle engineering, we consider theoretically the locomotion of shape-changing bilayer vesicles at low Reynolds number. By modulating their volume and membrane composition, the vesicles can be made to change…
\emph{Spiroplasma} swimming is studied with a simple model based on resistive-force theory. Specifically, we consider a bacterium shaped in the form of a helix that propagates traveling-wave distortions which flip the handedness of the…
We propose a method to parameterize a coarse grained model for the hydrodynamic friction between nearly touching rough spheres in suspension flows. The frictional resistance due to surface roughness primarily alters the sliding and rolling…
Particles whose shapes couple translation to rotation display a rich array of behaviors as they sediment at low Reynolds number. We introduce a unifying perspective in which the possible dynamical regimes and bifurcations between them can…
Equilibrating proteins and other biomacromolecules is cardinal for molecular dynamics simulation of such biological systems in which they perform free dynamics without any externally-applied mechanical constraint, until thermodynamic…