Related papers: Dynamics of bacterial aggregates in microflows
We consider a model of a thin film elastically attached to a rigid substrate. In the case in which the film expands relative to the substrate and assuming certain non-linear elastic behavior of the film, expansion ridges may appear, in…
The dynamics and stability of thin liquid films have fascinated scientists over many decades. Thin film flows are central to numerous areas of engineering, geophysics, and biophysics and occur over a wide range of length, velocity, and…
Diffusioosmotic flow arises in microfluidic configurations due to solute concentration gradients. In soft microfluidic channels, internal pressure gradients generated by diffusioosmotic flow to conserve mass result in elastic deformation of…
The growth of plants is a hydromechanical phenomenon in which cells enlarge by absorbing water, while their walls expand and remodel under turgor-induced tension. In multicellular tissues, where cells are mechanically interconnected,…
The dynamic behavior of microtubules in solution can be strongly modified by interactions with walls or other structures. We examine here a microtubule growth model where the increase in size of the plus-end is perturbed by collisions with…
In this paper we study a Darcy-scale mathematical model for biofilm formation in porous media. The pores in the core are divided into three phases: water, oil, and biofilm. The water and oil flow are modeled by an extended version of…
We derive the stochastic model of plasma-condensate systems by taking into account anisotropy in transference of adatoms between neighbor layers and by introducing fluctuations of adsorbate flux. We show, that by varying the fluctuation's…
Many porous media are mixtures of inert and reactive materials, manifesting spatio-chemical heterogeneity. We study the evolution of scalar transport in a chemically heterogeneous material that mimics a green roof soil substrate,…
Communities of swimming microorganisms often thrive near liquid-air interfaces. We study how such `active carpets' shape their aquatic environment by driving biogenic transport in the water column beneath them. The hydrodynamic stirring…
Immotile microbes inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from soils and sediments to food matrices -- yet how they disperse through these physically confining environments is poorly understood. Here, we show that immotile microbial…
The dynamics of biofilm lifecycle are deeply influenced by the surrounding environment and the interactions between sessile and planktonic phenotypes. Bacterial biofilms typically develop in three distinct stages: attachment of cells to a…
Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…
We investigate the dynamical behavior of both binary fluid and ternary microemulsion systems in two dimensions using a recently introduced hydrodynamic lattice-gas model of microemulsions. We find that the presence of amphiphile in our…
The control of biofilm formation is a challenging goal that has not been reached yet in many aspects. One is the role of van der Waals forces and another the importance of mutual interactions between the adsorbing and the adsorbed…
Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
Understanding non-equilibrium phenomena, such as growth, and connecting them to equilibrium phase behavior is a major challenge, in particular for complex multicomponent materials. We use X-ray reflectivity to determine the surface…
Recent experiments on active materials, such as dense bacterial suspensions and microtubule-kinesin motor mixtures, show a promising potential for achieving self-sustained flows. However, to develop active microfluidics it is necessary to…
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…
Acoustic microstreaming has several industrial, therapeutic, and biomedical applications - Acoustic cleaning, micromixing, microfluid transport, hemolysis, sonoporation. The acoustic microstreaming due to the oscillation of ultrasound…
We introduce a general theoretical framework to study the shape dynamics of actively growing and remodeling surfaces. Using this framework we develop a physical model for growing bacterial cell walls and study the interplay of cell shape…