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Many microorganisms and artificial microswimmers use helical appendages in order to generate locomotion. Though often rotated so as to produce thrust, some species of bacteria such Spiroplasma, Rhodobacter sphaeroides and Spirochetes induce…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…
We develop a continuum theory of linear viscoelastic response in oriented monodomain nematic elastomers. The expression for dissipation function is analogous to the Leslie-Ericksen version of anisotropic nematic viscosity; we propose the…
Swimming micro-organisms such as flagellated bacteria and sperm cells have fascinating locomotion capabilities. Inspired by their natural motion, there is an ongoing effort to develop artificial robotic nano-swimmers for potential in-body…
Many biological microswimmers can modulate their swimming gait to achieve directional control of motility, especially when performing steering towards specific directional cues. This can be achieved without the need for obvious…
Microswimmers are active particles of microscopic size that self-propel by setting the surrounding fluid into motion. According to the kind of far-field fluid flow that they induce, they are classified into pushers and pullers. Many studies…
Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…
Elongate animals and robots use undulatory body waves to locomote through diverse environments. Geometric mechanics provides a framework to model and optimize such systems in highly damped environments, connecting a prescribed shape change…
Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…
We compute the temporal evolution of the pressure anisotropy and bulk pressure of a massive gas using second-order viscous hydrodynamics and anisotropic hydrodynamics. We then compare our results with an exact solution of the Boltzmann…
Ribbons are long narrow strips possessing three distinct material length scales (thickness, width, and length) which allow them to produce unique shapes unobtainable by wires or filaments. For example when a ribbon has half a twist and is…
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…
Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…
This work comprises a detailed theoretical and computational study of the boundary value problem for transversely isotropic linear elastic bodies. General conditions for well-posedness are derived in terms of the material parameters. The…
Incompressibility is established for three-dimensional and two-dimensional deformations of an anisotropic linearly elastic material, as conditions to be satisfied by the elastic compliances. These conditions make it straightforward to…
Using explicit-water molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of a generic pocket-ligand model we investigate how chemical and shape anisotropy of small ligands influences the affinities, kinetic rates and pathways for their association to…
In this paper, we study the anisotropy classes of the fourth order elastic tensors of the relaxed micromorphic model, also introducing their second order counterpart by using a Voigt-type vector notation. In strong contrast with the usual…
Taylor's swimming sheet is a classical model of microscale propulsion and pumping. Many biological fluids and substances are fibrous, having a preferred direction in their microstructure; for example cervical mucus is formed of polymer…
Dynamics at low Reynolds numbers experiences recent revival in the fields of biophysics and active matter. While in bulk isotropic fluids it is exhaustively studied, this is less so in anisotropic fluids and in confined situations. Here, we…
The random walk of a bonded monomer in a polymer melt is anisotropic due to local order and bond connectivity. We investigate both effects by molecular-dynamics simulations on melts of fully-flexible linear chains ranging from dimers…