Related papers: Water surface swimming dynamics in lightweight cen…
Three-dimensional simulations with fully resolved hydrodynamics are performed to study the collective motion of model swimmers in confinement. We show that certain swimming mechanisms can lead to traveling wave-like collective motion even…
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…
We employ three numerical methods to explore the motion of low Reynolds number swimmers, modeling the hydrodynamic interactions by means of the Oseen tensor approximation, lattice Boltzmann simulations and multiparticle collision dynamics.…
Suspensions of self-propelled particles, such as swimming micro-organisms, are known to undergo complex dynamics as a result of hydrodynamic interactions. This fluid dynamics video presents a numerical simulation of such a suspension, based…
Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…
The drag anisotropy of slender filaments is a critical physical property allowing swimming in low-Reynolds number flows, and without it linear translation is impossible. Here we show that, in contrast, net rotation can occur under isotropic…
Microorganisms are able to overcome the thermal randomness of their surroundings by harvesting energy to navigate in viscous fluid environments. In a similar manner, synthetic colloidal microswimmers are capable of mimicking complex…
Temperature changes as small as $3 ^\circ$C have been observed to significantly impact how self-propelled organisms move through their environment, especially for those inhabiting the transitional flow regime in which both viscous and…
The locomotion and design of microswimmers are topical issues of current fundamental and applied research. In addition to numerous living and artificial active microswimmers, a passive microswimmer was identified only recently: a soft,…
Legged locomotion on flowing ground ({\em e.g.} granular media) is unlike locomotion on hard ground because feet experience both solid- and fluid-like forces during surface penetration. Recent bio-inspired legged robots display speed…
Self-propelled particles have been experimentally shown to orbit spherical obstacles and move along surfaces. Here, we theoretically and numerically investigate this behavior for a hydrodynamic squirmer interacting with spherical objects…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
The world's oceans are in constant motion, transporting the sun's heat from the equator to the poles, bringing marine life fresh supplies of oxygen and nutrients, and sequestering nearly half of our carbon dioxide emissions since the…
Physics governing the locomotion of microorganisms and other microsystems is dominated by viscous damping. An effective swimming strategy involves the non-reciprocal and periodic deformations of the considered body. Here, we show that a…
E. M. Purcell showed that a body has to perform non-reciprocal motion in order to propel itself in a highly viscous environment. The swimmer with one degree of freedom is bound to do reciprocal motion, whereby the center of mass of the…
Microswimmers can acquire information on the surrounding fluid by sensing mechanical queues. They can then navigate in response to these signals. We analyse this navigation by combining deep reinforcement learning with direct numerical…
Despite their importance in many biological, ecological and physical processes, microorganismal fluid flows under tight confinement have not been investigated experimentally. Strong screening of Stokelets in this geometry suggests that the…
Swimming in curved spacetimes is a phenomenon whereby free bodies in curved spacetimes are able to propel themselves by performing cyclic internal motions. When originally proposed, it was further suggested that, in the limit of fast…
Anisotropic viscous drag is usually believed to be a requirement for the low Reynolds number locomotion of slender bodies such as flagella and cilia. Here we show that locomotion under isotropic drag is possible for extensible slender…
Zooplankton live in dynamic environments where turbulence may challenge their limited swimming abilities. How this interferes with fundamental behavioral processes remains elusive. We reconstruct simultaneously the trajectories of flow…