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In recent years, slippery surfaces have attracted significant interest due to their excellent liquid-repellent properties and their potential in diverse commercial applications. Such surfaces are prepared by coating functionalized solid…
Locomotion by shape changes (spermatozoon swimming, snake slithering, bird flapping) or gas expulsion (rocket firing) is assumed to require environmental interaction, due to conservation of momentum. As first noted in (Wisdom, 2003) and…
We study the time evolution and driven motion of thin liquid films lying on top of chemical patterns on a substrate. Lattice-Boltzmann and molecular dynamics methods are used for simulations of the flow of microscopic and nanoscopic films,…
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,…
We study theoretically the profile evolution of a thin viscoelastic film supported onto a no-slip flat substrate. Due to the nonconstant initial curvature at the free surface, there is a flow driven by Laplace pressure and mediated by…
Taking inspiration from the crawling motion of biological cells on a substrate, we consider a physical model of self-propulsion where the spatio-temporal driving can involve both, a mechanical actuation by active force couples, and a…
We study theoretically the self-propulsion dynamics of a small droplet on general curved surfaces by a variational approach. A new reduced model is derived based on careful computations for the capillary energy and the viscous dissipation…
Cilia and flagella are hair-like appendages that protrude from the surface of a variety of eukaryotic cells and deform in a wavelike fashion to transport fluids and propel cells. Motivated by the ubiquity of non-Newtonian fluids in biology,…
The co-moving velocity is a new variable in the description of immiscible two-phase flow in porous media. It is the saturation-weighted average over the derivatives of the seepage velocities of the two immiscible fluids with respect to…
Microswimmers are sub-millimeter swimming microrobots that show potential as a platform for controllable locomotion in applications including targeted cargo delivery and minimally invasive surgery. To be viable for these target…
We theoretically investigate the looping dynamics of a linear polymer immersed in a viscoelastic fluid. The dynamics of the chain is governed by a Rouse model with a fractional memory kernel recently proposed by Weber et al. (S. C. Weber,…
This paper applies the theory of rate-independent systems to model the locomotion of bio-mimetic soft crawlers. We prove the well-posedness of the approach and illustrate how the various strategies adopted by crawlers to achieve locomotion,…
An overview of computer simulations of tribology is presented. The chapter begins with a brief overview of simulation techniques and the special requirements for simulations of tribological processes. Then simple one-dimensional models of…
We examine theoretically the spreading of a viscous liquid drop over a thin film of uniform thickness, assuming the liquid's viscosity is regulated by the concentration of a solute that is carried passively by the spreading flow. The solute…
Over the past few decades, oscillating flexible foils have been used to study the physics of organismal propulsion in different fluid environments. Here we extend this work to a study of flexible foils in a frictional environment. When the…
Direct numerical simulations are used to investigate the individual dynamics of large spherical particles suspended in a developed homogeneous turbulent flow. A definition of the direction of the particle motion relative to the surrounding…
Computing stabilizing and optimal control actions for legged locomotion in real time is difficult due to the nonlinear, hybrid, and high dimensional nature of these robots. The hybrid nature of the system introduces a combination of…
Surface tension-driven flow techniques have recently emerged as an efficient means of shedding light into the rheology of thin polymer films. Motivated by experimental and theoretical approaches in films bearing a varying surface…
We develop a unified theoretical framework for thin-film hydrodynamics on inclined solid substrates, integrating capillarity, intermolecular forces, gravitational symmetry breaking, confined transport and stochastic wetting into a single…
The hypersphere model is a simple one-parameter model of the potential energy landscape of viscous liquids, which is defined as a percolating system of same-radius hyperspheres randomly distributed in $\mathbb{R}^{3N}$ in which $N$ is the…