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Viscoelasticity governs the locomotion strategies of deformable microorganisms, rendering it a fundamental mechanical property of microbial motility and an integral component in the design of envisioned microbots. Recent studies have shown…
Swimming organisms in their natural habitat navigate through a wide array of geometries and chemical environments. Interaction with the boundaries is ubiquitous and can significantly modify the swimming characteristics of the organism as…
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…
We use a three-bead-spring model to investigate the dynamics of bi-flagellate micro-swimmers near a surface. While the primary dynamics and scattering are governed by geometric-dependent direct contact, the fluid flows generated by the…
Undulatory locomotion is ubiquitous in nature and observed in different media, from the swimming of flagellated microorganisms in biological fluids, to the slithering of snakes on land, or the locomotion of sandfish lizards in sand. Despite…
The biological fluids encountered by self-propelled cells display complex microstructures and rheology. We consider here the general problem of low-Reynolds number locomotion in a complex fluid. {Building on classical work on the transport…
We analyze a minimal model for a rigid spherical microswimmer and explore the consequences of its extended surface on the interplay between its self-propulsion and flow properties. The model is the first order representation of…
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…
Robot controllers are often optimised for a single robot in a single environment. This approach proves brittle, as such a controller will often fail to produce sensible behavior for a new morphology or environment. In comparison, animal…
Many microorganisms swim through gels and non-Newtonian fluids in their natural environments. In this paper, we focus on microorganisms which use flagella for propulsion. We address how swimming velocities are affected in nonlinearly…
The hydrodynamics of fish swimming depend on the interaction between the undulation of the body and the flapping of the caudal fin. This study develops a computational framework of a Jackfish-inspired swimmer with an independently mounted…
Biological organisms swimming at low Reynolds number are often influenced by the presence of rigid boundaries and soft interfaces. In this paper we present an analysis of locomotion near a free surface with surface tension. Using a…
In several biologically relevant situations, cell locomotion occurs in polymeric fluids with Weissenberg {number} larger than one. Here we present results of three-dimensional numerical simulations for the steady locomotion of a…
We use the boundary element method to study the low-Reynolds number locomotion of a spherical model microorganism in a circular tube. The swimmer propels itself by tangen- tial or normal surface motion in a tube whose radius is on the order…
The millimeter-long soil-dwelling nematode {\it C. elegans} propels itself by producing undulations that propagate along its body and turns by assuming highly curved shapes. According to our recent study [PLoS ONE \textbf{7}, e40121 (2012)]…
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…
Fish typically swim by periodic bending of their bodies. Bending seems to follow a universal rule; it occurs at about one-third from the posterior end of the fish body with a maximum bending angle of about $30^o$. However, the hydrodynamic…
Understanding swimming in soft yielding media is challenging due to their complex deformation response to the swimmer's motion. We experimentally show that a scallop-inspired swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings generates locomotion in…
In this fluid dynamics video we investigate the flow field around straight-line swimming and right and left turning Paramecia using micro- particle image velocimetry ({\mu}PIV). A Paramecium controls its ciliary beating to produce different…
Many cells exploit the bending or rotation of flagellar filaments in order to self-propel in viscous fluids. While appropriate theoretical modelling is available to capture flagella locomotion in simple, Newtonian fluids, formidable…