Related papers: Designing optimal elastic filaments for viscous pr…
The effect of flexibility on the hydrodynamic loads and on the flow structures generated on a rectangular foil when oscillating in pitch has been studied. Hydrodynamic loads were measured with a 6-axes balance, and the flow structures were…
The elastohydrodynamics of slender bodies in a viscous fluid have long been the source of theoretical investigation, being pertinent to the microscale world of ciliates and flagellates as well as to biological and engineered active matter…
The motion of flexible fibers through structured fluidic environments is ubiquitous in nature and industrial applications. Most often, their dynamics results from the complex interplay between internal elastic stresses, contact forces and…
Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…
The formation and destabilisation of viscoelastic filaments are of importance in many industrial and biological processes. Filament instabilities have been observed for viscoelastic fluids but recently also for soft elastic solids. In this…
The motility of microorganisms is influenced greatly by their hydrodynamic interactions with the fluidic environment they inhabit. We show by direct experimental observation of the bi-flagellated alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that fluid…
Biological locomotion in nature is often achieved by the interaction between a flexible body and its surrounding medium. The interaction of a flexible body with granular media is less understood compared with viscous fluids partially due to…
We present a detailed numerical study of a microscopic artificial swimmer realized recently by Dreyfus et al. in experiments [R. Dreyfus et al., Nature 437, 862 (2005)]. It consists of an elastic filament composed of superparamagnetic…
The equilibrium state of a flexible fiber settling in a viscous fluid is examined using a combination of macroscopic experiments, numerical simulations and scaling arguments. We identify three regimes having different signatures on this…
It has been known for some time that some microorganisms can swim faster in high-viscosity gel-forming polymer solutions. These gel-like media come to mimic highly viscous heterogeneous environment that these microorganisms encounter…
The fluid-structure interactions between flexible fibers and viscous flows play an essential role in various biological phenomena, medical problems, and industrial processes. Of particular interest is the case of particles freely…
Buckling plays a critical role in the transport and dynamics of elastic microfilaments in Stokesian fluids. However, previous work has only considered filaments with homogeneous structural properties. Filament backbone stiffness can be…
A single flexible filament can be actuated to escape from the scallop theorem and generate net propulsion at low Reynolds number. In this work, we study the dynamics of a simple boundary-driven multi-filament swimmer, a two-arm clamshell…
This work aims at finding optimal navigation policies for thin, deformable microswimmers that progress in a viscous fluid by propagating a sinusoidal undulation along their slender body. These active filaments are embedded in a prescribed,…
Viscoelasticity governs the locomotion strategies of deformable microorganisms, rendering it a fundamental mechanical property of microbial motility and an integral component in the design of envisioned microbots. Recent studies have shown…
Oscillations of flagella and cilia play an important role in biology, which motivates the idea of functional mimicry as part of bio-inspired applications. Nevertheless, it still remains challenging to drive their artificial counterparts to…
A stiff one-armed swimmer in glycerine goes nowhere, but if its arm is elastic, exerting a restorative torque proportional to local curvature, the swimmer can go on its way. Considering this happy consequence and the principles of…
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,…
Active semiflexible filaments are crucial in various biophysical processes, yet insights into their single-filament behavior have predominantly relied on theory and simulations, owing to the scarcity of controllable synthetic systems. Here,…
Motivated by diverse phenomena in cellular biophysics, including bacterial flagellar motion and DNA transcription and replication, we study the overdamped nonlinear dynamics of a rotationally forced filament with twist and bend elasticity.…