Related papers: Boosting micromachine studies with Stokesian Dynam…
In isotropic fluids like water, micrometer-scale swimmers have evolved swim strokes to translate despite their tiny size. As described by Purcell in his Scallop Theorem, reciprocal motions, like those performed by a scallop, cannot drive…
One of the principal mechanisms by which surfaces and interfaces affect microbial life is by perturbing the hydrodynamic flows generated by swimming. By summing a recursive series of image systems we derive a numerically tractable…
Efficient locomotion is important for the evolution of complex life, yet the physical principles selecting specific swimming strokes often remain entangled with biological constraints. In viscous fluids, the scallop theorem constrains the…
Robotic swimmers are currently a subject of extensive research and development for several underwater applications. Clever design and planning must rely on simple theoretical models that account for the swimmer's hydrodynamics in order to…
Swimming in circles occurs in a variety of situations at low Reynolds number. Here we propose a simple model for a swimmer that undergoes circular motion, generalising the model of a linear swimmer proposed by Najafi and Golestanian (Phys.…
Locomotion in Stokes flow is an intensively-studied problem because it describes important biological phenomena such as the motility of many species' sperm, bacteria, algae and protozoa. Numerical computations can be challenging,…
As technological advances allow us to fabricate smaller autonomous self-propelled devices, it is clear that at some point directed propulsion could not come from pre-specified deterministic periodic deformation of the swimmer's body and we…
Microswimmers in turbulent flows often navigate complex, heterogeneous, and obstacle-rich environments, where they exhibit intricate behaviors such as trapping at and escape from obstacles. We generalize recent $\mathcal{Q}-$learning…
The aim of this paper is to describe the self-propulsion of a micro-robot (or micro-swimmer) consisting of $N$ spheres moving along a fixed line. The spheres are linked to each other by arms with the lengths changing periodically. For the…
Hydrodynamic interactions in systems comprised of self-propelled particles, such as swimming microorganisms, and passive tracers have a significant impact on the tracer dynamics compared to the equivalent "dry" sample. However, such…
We discuss a locomotion of a three-sphere microswimmer in a viscoelastic medium and propose a new type of active microrheology. We derive a relation which connects average swimming velocity and frequency-dependent viscosity of the…
The swimming of a sphere immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid with inertia is studied for surface modulations of small amplitude on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. The mean swimming velocity and the mean rate of dissipation…
The current study presents a systematic investigation of the locomotion performance of a swimmer with a wide range of parameter settings. Two-dimensional simulations with the immersed boundary method are employed for the fluid-structure…
The paper is about the parking 3-sphere swimmer ($\text{sPr}_3$). This is a low-Reynolds number model swimmer composed of three balls of equal radii. The three balls can move along three horizontal axes (supported in the same plane) that…
The spatiotemporal dynamics in systems of active self-propelled particles is controlled by the propulsion mechanism in combination with various direct interactions, such as steric repulsion, hydrodynamics, and chemical fields. Yet, these…
Swimming microorganisms often self propel in fluids with complex rheology. While past theoretical work indicates that fluid viscoelasticity should hinder their locomotion, recent experiments on waving swimmers suggest a possible…
We study the three-dimensional dynamics of a spherical microswimmer in cylindrical Poiseuille flow which can be mapped onto a Hamiltonian system. Swinging and tumbling trajectories are identified. In 2D they are equivalent to oscillating…
The locomotion of microorganisms and spermatozoa in complex viscoelastic fluids is of critical importance in many biological processes such as fertilization, infection, and biofilm formation. Depending on their propulsion mechanisms,…
A matrix formulation is derived for the calculation of the swimming speed and the power required for swimming of an assembly of rigid spheres immersed in a viscous fluid of infinite extent. The spheres may have arbitrary radii and may…
Many microswimmers are able to swim through viscous fluids by employing periodic non-reciprocal deformations of their appendages. Here we use a simple microswimmer model inspired by swimming biflagellates which consists of a spherical cell…