Related papers: Mixing by squirmers in stratified fluids
Efficient mixing of fluids is essential in many practical applications to achieve homogeneity. For microscopic systems, however, both diffusion and turbulence are ineffective methods to achieve chaotic mixing due to the low Reynolds number,…
Small organisms (e.g., bacteria) and artificial microswimmers move due to a combination of active swimming and passive Brownian motion. Considering a simplified linear three-sphere swimmer, we study how the swimmer size regulates the…
Squirmers are models of a class of microswimmers, such as ciliated organisms and phoretic particles, that self-propel in fluids without significant deformation of their body shape. Available techniques for their simulation are based on 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…
Self-propelled particles can exhibit surprising non-equilibrium behaviors, and how they interact with obstacles or boundaries remains an important open problem. Here we show that chemically propelled micro-rods can be captured, with little…
We study, by means of an exact analytical solution, the motion of a spheroidal, axisymmetric squirmer in an unbounded fluid, as well as the low Reynolds number hydrodynamic flow associated to it. In contrast to the case of a spherical…
Swimming at small Reynolds number of a linear assembly of identical spheres immersed in a viscous fluid is studied on the basis of a set of equations of motion for the individual spheres. The motion of the spheres is caused by actuating…
Using lattice Boltzmann simulations we study the hydrodynamics of an active spherical particle near a no-slip wall. We develop a computational model for an active Janus particle, by considering different and independent mobilities on the…
We present an experimental study of the statistical properties of millimeter-size spheres floating on the surface of a turbulent flow. The flow is generated in a layer of liquid metal by an electromagnetic forcing. By using two magnet…
A recently introduced numerical scheme for calculating self-diffusion coefficients of solid objects embedded in lipid bilayer membranes is extended to enable calculation of hydrodynamic interactions between multiple objects. The method is…
Due to the combined effect of anisotropic interactions and activity, Janus swimmers are capable to self-assemble in a wide variety of structures, many more than their equilibrium counterpart. This might lead to the development of novel…
In dense flowing bidisperse particle mixtures varying in size or density alone, smaller particles sink (driven by percolation) and lighter particles rise (driven by buoyancy). But when the particle species differ from each other in both…
A new mechanism for micro-swimmer motion in an aquatic environment, which implies light-induced polarization perturbations as a motivation for its motion, is proposed. The mechanism assumes that natural light leads to an enhancement of the…
Recently, an active microswimmer was constructed where a micron-sized droplet of bromine water was placed into a surfactant-laden oil phase. Due to a bromination reaction of the surfactant at the interface, the surface tension locally…
Microswimmers, especially in theoretical treatments, are generally taken to be completely inertia-free, since inertial effects on their motion are typically small and assuming their absence simplifies the problem considerably. Yet in nature…
We study active agents embedded in bulk or in confinement explicitly considering hydrodynamics and simulating the swimmers via an implementation inspired by the squirmer model. We develop a Dissipative Particle Dynamics scheme for the…
Recent numerical results show that if a scalar is mixed by periodically forced turbulence, the average mixing rate is directly affected for forcing frequencies small compared to the integral turbulence frequency. We elucidate this by an…
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…
Self-propelled phoretic colloids have recently emerged as a promising avenue for the design of artificial swimmers. These swimmers combine purely phoretic interactions with intricate hydrodynamics which critically depend on the swimmer…
We perform hydrodynamic simulations using the method of multi-particle collision dynamics and a theoretical analysis to study a single squirmer microswimmer at high P\'eclet number, which moves in a low Reynolds number fluid and under…