Related papers: Mapping flagellated swimmers to surface-slip drive…

The design of artificial microswimmers is often inspired by the strategies of natural microorganisms. Many of these creatures exploit the fact that elasticity breaks the time-reversal symmetry of motion at low Reynolds numbers, but this…

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…

The behaviour of microscopic swimmers has previously been explored near large scale confining geometries and in the presence of very small-scale surface roughness. Here we consider an intermediate case of how a simple microswimmer, the…

Inspired by the classical Kepler and Rutherford problem, we investigate an analogous set-up in the context of active microswimmers: the behavior of a deformable microswimmer in a swirl flow. First we identify new steady bound states in the…

We demonstrate with experiments and simulations how microscopic self-propelled particles navigate through environments presenting complex spatial features, which mimic the conditions inside cells, living organisms and future lab-on-a-chip…

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…

In a recent letter (Friedrich et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109:138102, 2012), a minimal model swimmer was proposed that propels itself at low Reynolds numbers by a revolving motion of a pair of spheres. The motion of the two spheres can…

We propose a hydrodynamic model for a spheroidal microswimmer with two tangential surface velocity modes. This model is analytically solvable and reduces to Lighthill's and Blake's spherical squirmer model in the limit of equal major and…

Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in the biological world and strongly affect the stability, topology, and transport properties of active suspensions in viscous flow. Based on a far-field analytical model, the…

Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…

Soft robotics has the potential to revolutionize robotic locomotion, in particular, soft robotic swimmers offer a minimally invasive and adaptive solution to explore and preserve our oceans. Unfortunately, current soft robotic swimmers are…

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…

Microswimmers (planktonic microorganisms or artificial active particles) immersed in a fluid interact with the ambient flow, altering their trajectories. In surface gravity waves, a common goal for microswimmers is vertical migration (e.g.,…

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…

Guiding active microswimmers by external fields to requested target locations is a promising strategy to realize complex transport on the microscale. To this end, one possibility consists of attaching the microswimmers to orientable passive…

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.…

We show that activity and broken fore-aft shape symmetry enable microswimmers to cross streamlines in nonuniform shear, a key yet overlooked factor in active cross-stream migration. Using a model of flagellated microswimmers in microchannel…

Microscopic self-propelled swimmers capable of autonomous navigation through complex environments provide appealing opportunities for localization, pick-up and delivery of micro-and nanoscopic objects. Inspired by motile cells and bacteria,…

Micro-scale swimming robots have been envisaged for many medical applications such as targeted drug delivery, where the microrobot will be expected to navigate in a fluid through channels carrying a payload. Alternatively, in many cases,…

Hydrodynamic interactions are crucial for determining the cooperative behavior of microswimmers at low Reynolds numbers. Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of the scaling and strength of the interactions in the case of a pair of…