Related papers: Locomotion on a lubricating fluid with spatial vis…
We conduct experiments with flexible swimmers to address the impact of fluid viscoelasticity on their locomotion. The swimmers are composed of a magnetic head actuated in rotation by a frequency-controlled magnetic field and a flexible tail…
The physical and bio-mechanical principles that govern undulatory movement on wet surfaces have important applications in physiology, physics, and engineering. The nematode {\it C. elegans}, with its highly stereotypical and functionally…
The response of Newtonian liquids to small perturbations is usually considered to be fully described by homogeneous transport coefficients like shear and dilatational viscosity. However, the presence of strong density gradients at the…
Consider the three-dimensional flow of a viscous Newtonian fluid upon an abitrarily curved substrate when the fluid film is thin as occurs in many draining, coating and biological flows. We derive a model of the dynamics of the film, the…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
We investigate the behavior of the slip length in Newtonian liquids subject to planar shear bounded by substrates with mixed boundary conditions. The upper wall, consisting of a homogenous surface of finite or vanishing slip, moves at a…
In this paper, we speculate on a possible application of Liquid Crystal Elastomers to the field of soft robotics. In particular, we study a concept for limbless locomotion that is amenable to miniaturisation. For this purpose, we formulate…
We present experimental and numerical results for a model crawler which is able to extract net positional changes from reciprocal shape changes, i.e. 'breathing-like' deformations, thanks to directional, frictional interactions with a…
Friction, the resistive force between two surfaces sliding past each other, is at the core of a wide diversity of locomotion schemes. While such schemes are somewhat understood for homogeneous environments, locomotion based on friction in…
Velocity relaxation of a spherically symmetric polymer, immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid, and after a sudden small impulse or a sudden twist from a state of rest, is studied on the basis of the linearized Navier-Stokes equations…
Swimming microorganisms often self propel in fluids with complex rheology. While past theoretical work indicates that fluid viscoelasticity should hinder their locomotion, recent experiments on waving swimmers suggest a possible…
We experimentally and theoretically study the dynamics of a low-Reynolds number helical swimmer moving across viscosity gradients. Experimentally, a double-layer viscosity is generated by superposing two miscible fluids with similar…
Molecular dynamics study of a thin (one to five layers) lubricant film between two substrates in moving contact are performed using Langevin equations with an external damping coefficient depending on distance and velocity of atoms relative…
Many cells exploit the bending or rotation of flagellar filaments in order to self-propel in viscous fluids. While appropriate theoretical modelling is available to capture flagella locomotion in simple, Newtonian fluids, formidable…
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…
A general adsorption model is developed to describe the interactions between near-wall fluid molecules and solid surface. This model serves as a framework for the theoretical modelling of the boundary slip phenomena. Based on this…
Recent experiments of thin films flowing down a vertical fiber with varying nozzle diameters present a wealth of new dynamics that illustrate the need for more advanced theory. We present a detailed analysis using a full lubrication model…
Depth averaged conservation equations are written for granular surface flows. Their application to the study of steady surface flows in a rotating drum allows to find experimentally the constitutive relations needed to close these equations…
A mathematical model is derived for the dynamics of a cylinder, or wheel, rolling over a thin viscous film. The model combines the Reynolds lubrication equation for the fluid with an equation of motion for the wheel. Two asymptotic limits…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…