English
Related papers

Related papers: Active spheroids in viscosity gradients

200 papers

Many biological microorganisms and artificial microswimmers react to external cues of environmental gradients by changing their swimming directions. We study here the behavior of eukarytic flagellated microswimmers in linear viscosity…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-29 Shubham Anand , Jens Elgeti , Gerhard Gompper

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-07-19 Andreas Zöttl

The habitat of microorganisms is typically complex and viscoelastic. A natural question arises: Do polymers in a suspension of active swimmers enhance chaotic motion or promote orientational order? We address this issue by performing…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-12-23 Yuan Zhou , Qingzhi Zou , Ignacio Pagonabarraga , Kaihuan Zhang , Kai Qi

The dynamics of anisotropic particles in viscous flows underpin a wide range of processes in soft matter, microfluidics, and targeted drug delivery. Here, we investigate the motion of externally driven prolate and oblate spheroids suspended…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-03-24 Aditya Bhowmik , Kevin Stratford , Oliver Henrich , Sumesh P. Thampi

We consider a suspension of active rigid particles (swimmers) in a steady Stokes flow, where particles are distributed according to a stationary ergodic random process, and we study its homogenization in the macroscopic limit. A key point…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2023-03-15 Armand Bernou , Mitia Duerinckx , Antoine Gloria

Understanding the hydrodynamics of microswimmers in viscoelastic fluids and confined environments is crucial for interpreting their behaviour in natural settings and designing synthetic microswimmers for practical applications like cargo…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2025-01-28 KVS Chaithanya , Sumesh P. Thampi

The gravity-driven motion of rigid particles in a viscous fluid is relevant in many natural and industrial processes, yet this has mainly been investigated for spherical particles. We therefore consider the sedimentation of non-spherical…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2021-02-23 Mehdi Niazi Ardekani , Pedro Costa , Wim-Paul Breugem , Luca Brandt

Particles such as microplastics and phytoplankton suspended in the water column in the natural environment are often subject to the action of surface gravity waves. By modelling such anisotropic particles as small spheroids that slowly…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2023-08-03 Nimish Pujara , Jean-Luc Thiffeault

The survival of many microorganisms, like \textit{Leptospira} or \textit{Spiroplasma} bacteria, can depend on their ability to navigate towards regions of favorable viscosity. While this ability, called viscotaxis, has been observed in…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-05-23 Benno Liebchen , Paul Monderkamp , Borge ten Hagen , Hartmut Löwen

The sedimentation dynamics of a prolate spheroidal particle in an unbounded elastoviscoplastic (EVP) fluid is studied by direct finite element simulations under inertialess flow conditions. The Saramito-Giesekus constitutive equation is…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2024-03-25 Alie Abbasi Yazdi , Gaetano DAvino

Many microorganisms take a chiral path while swimming in an ambient uid. In this paper, we study the combined behavior of two chiral swimmers using the well-known squirmer model taking into account chiral asymmetries. In contrast to the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-02-23 P. S. Burada , R. Maity , F. Jülicher

Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2017-11-16 Alexander Chamolly , Takuji Ishikawa , Eric Lauga

We derive from first principles a three-dimensional theory of self-propelled particle swarming in a viscous fluid environment. Our model predicts emergent collective behavior that depends critically on fluid opacity, mechanism of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-12 Yao-Li Chuang , M. R. D'Orsogna , T. Chou

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…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2021-09-14 Kenta Ishimoto , Eamonn A. Gaffney , David J. Smith

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,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-09-14 Gaojin Li , Eric Lauga , Arezoo M. Ardekani

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-06-03 Mario Theers , Elmar Westphal , Kai Qi , Roland G. Winkler , Gerhard Gompper

The role of passive body dynamics on the kinematics of swimming micro-organisms in complex fluids is investigated. Asymptotic analysis of small amplitude motions of a finite-length undulatory swimmer in a Stokes-Oldroyd-B fluid is used to…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2017-10-11 Becca Thomases , Robert D. Guy

A striking feature of the collective behavior of spherical microswimmers is that for sufficiently strong self-propulsion they phase-separate into a dense cluster coexisting with a low-density dis- ordered surrounding. Extending our previous…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-10-31 Johannes Blaschke , Maurice Maurer , Karthik Menon , Andreas Zöttl , Holger Stark

Systems of spherical particles moving in Stokes flow are studied for a different particle internal structure and boundaries, including the Navier-slip model. It is shown that their hydrodynamic interactions are well described by treating…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-06-18 Bogdan Cichocki , Maria L. Ekiel-Jezewska , Eligiusz Wajnryb

We study the orientation statistics of spheroidal, axisymmetric microswimmers, with shapes ranging from disks to rods, swimming in chaotic, moderately turbulent flows. Numerical simulations show that rod-like active particles preferentially…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2019-10-02 M. Borgnino , K. Gustavsson , F. De Lillo , G. Boffetta , M. Cencini , B. Mehlig