Related papers: Intermittent flow paths in biofilms grown in a mic…
Bacterial biofilms mechanically behave as viscoelastic media consisting of micron-sized bacteria crosslinked to a selfproduced network of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) embedded in water. Structural principles for numerical…
Buckling induced by viscous flow changes the shape of sheet-like nanomaterial particles suspended in liquids. This instability at the particle scale affects collective behavior of suspension flows and has many technological and biological…
The motion of microorganisms in their natural habitat is strongly influenced by their propulsion mechanisms, geometrical constraints, and random fluctuations. Here, we study numerically the first-passage-time (FPT) statistics of…
Fluid stretching in porous media governs the mixing of reactants, contaminants, and nutrients, yet how the solid microstructure controls the stretching statistics remains poorly understood. We investigate how porous-medium heterogeneity…
Granular flows during a shear-induced mixing process are studied using Discrete Element Methods. The aim is to understand the underlying elementary mechanisms of transition from unmixed to mixed phases for a granular material featuring a…
When a granular bed is sheared by a fluid that flows above a critical limit, it undergoes a complex motion that varies along time: it can contain fluid- (bedload) and solid-like (creep) regions, being prone to strain hardening and, in case…
Collective transport through channels shows surprising properties under one-dimensional confinement: particles in a single file exhibit sub-diffusive behavior, while liquid confinement causes distance-independent correlations between the…
In recent years, Darcy scale transport in porous media was characterized to be Fickian or non-Fickian due to the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the porous medium conductivity layout. Yet, evidence shows that preferential flows that funnel…
We report experiments on slow granular flows in a split-bottom Couette cell that show novel strain localization features. Nontrivial flow profiles have been observed which are shown to be the consequence of simultaneous formation of shear…
This review article examines the complex dynamics of thin-film flows of granular suspensions spreading over rigid solid substrates with free air interfaces. Such systems feature an involved coupling of the free-surface dynamics with the…
Biological microswimmers often encounter deformable boundaries in physiological conditions; for instance, the viscoelastic walls of reproductive tract during migration of spermatozoa, or host tissue during early bacterial biofilm formation.…
Polymer solutions exhibit anomalous flow thickening -- marked by an abrupt increase in the macroscopic flow resistance -- above a threshold flow rate in a porous medium, but not in bulk solution. This phenomenon has evaded a mechanistic…
An experimental study of flows of the green non-motile Chlorella micro-alga in a plane microchannel is presented. Depending on the value of the cell volume fraction, three distinct flow regimes are observed. For low values of the cell…
Significance: For the first time to our knowledge, a millifluidic device has been designed to observe the effects of blue-light irradiation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PA01 bacterial biofilm. Approach: A bacterial biofilm is formed under…
The spreading of bacterial colonies at solid-air interfaces is determined by the physico-chemical properties of the involved interfaces. The production of surfactant molecules by bacteria is a widespread strategy that allows the colony to…
The prediction of the first fluidized path of a yield-stress fluid in complex porous media is a challenging yet an important task to understand the fundamentals of fluid flow in several industrial and biological processes. In most cases,…
The hydrodynamics of a flagellated microorganism is investigated when swimming close to a planar free-slip surface by means of numerical solu- tions of the Stokes equations obtained via a Boundary Element Method. Depending on the initial…
How producers of public goods persist in microbial communities is a major question in evolutionary biology. Cooperation is evolutionarily unstable, since cheating strains can reproduce quicker and take over. Spatial structure has been shown…
The slow flow of amorphous solids exhibits striking heterogeneities: swift localised particle rearrangements take place in the midst of a more or less homogeneously deforming medium. Recently, experimental as well as numerical work has…
Soft surfaces, spanning vastly different environmental and biomedical settings, are frequently colonised by surface-associated bacteria. Yet, how soft surfaces govern bacterial dynamics and their self-organisation into colonies remains…