Related papers: Designing phoretic micro- and nano-swimmers
Surface interactions provide a class of mechanisms which can be employed for propulsion of micro- and nanometer sized particles. We investigate the related efficiency of externally and self-propelled swimmers. A general scaling relation is…
Self-propelled microparticles create flow fields that determine how they interact with surfaces, external flows, and each other. These flow fields fall into distinct classes--pushers, pullers, and neutral swimmers--each exhibiting…
An optimal microswimmer with a given geometry has a surface velocity profile that minimizes energy dissipation for a given swimming speed. An axisymmetric swimmer can be puller-, pusher-, or neutral-type depending on the sign of the…
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…
We study the effect of a nearby planar wall on the propulsion of a spherical phoretic micro-swimmer driven by reactions on its surface. An asymmetric coverage of catalysts on its surface which absorb reactants and generate products gives…
The swimming of a sphere immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid with inertia is studied for surface modulations of small amplitude on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. The mean swimming velocity and the mean rate of dissipation…
Among the few methods which have been proposed to create small-scale swimmers, those relying on self-phoretic mechanisms present an interesting design challenge in that chemical gradients are required to generate net propulsion. Building on…
The self-propelled motion of microscopic bodies immersed in a fluid medium is studied using molecular dynamics simulation. The advantage of the atomistic approach is that the detailed level of description allows complete freedom in…
We study the local controllability properties of 2D and 3D bio-mimetic swimmers employing the change of their geometric shape to propel themselves in an incompressible fluid described by Navier-Stokes equations. It is assumed that swimmers'…
Unlike pressure-driven flows, surface-mediated phoretic flows provide efficient means to drive fluid motion on very small scales. Colloidal particles covered with chemically-active patches with nonzero phoretic mobility (e.g. Janus…
Various microswimmers move along circles rather than straight lines due to their swimming mechanisms, body shapes or hydrodynamic effects. Here, we adopt the concepts of stochastic thermodynamics to analyze circle swimmers confined in a…
Microswimmers can acquire information on the surrounding fluid by sensing mechanical queues. They can then navigate in response to these signals. We analyse this navigation by combining deep reinforcement learning with direct numerical…
A new mechanism for micro-swimmer motion in an aquatic environment, which implies light-induced polarization perturbations as a motivation for its motion, is proposed. The mechanism assumes that natural light leads to an enhancement of the…
We demonstrate with experiments and simulations how microscopic self-propelled particles navigate through environments presenting complex spatial features, which mimic the conditions inside cells, living organisms and future lab-on-a-chip…
Self-propelled particles can exhibit surprising non-equilibrium behaviors, and how they interact with obstacles or boundaries remains an important open problem. Here we show that chemically propelled micro-rods can be captured, with little…
Microswimmers (planktonic microorganisms or artificial active particles) immersed in a fluid interact with the ambient flow, altering their trajectories. In surface gravity waves, a common goal for microswimmers is vertical migration (e.g.,…
We explore hydrodynamic interactions between microswimmers and corrugated, or rough, surfaces, as found often in biological systems and microfluidic devices. Using the Lorentz reciprocal theorem for viscous flows we derive exact expressions…
We theoretically study the self-propulsion of a thin (slender) colloid driven by asymmetric chemical reactions on its surface at vanishing Reynolds number. Using the method of matched asymptotic expansions, we obtain the colloid…
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 properties of biological microswimmers are to a large extent determined by fluid-mediated interactions, which govern their propulsion, perception of their surrounding, and the steering of their motion for feeding or in pursuit.…