Soft swimming: Exploiting deformable interfaces for low-Reynolds number locomotion

Abstract

Reciprocal movement cannot be used for locomotion at low-Reynolds number in an infinite fluid or near a rigid surface. Here we show that this limitation is relaxed for a body performing reciprocal motions near a deformable interface. Using physical arguments and scaling relationships, we show that the nonlinearities arising from reciprocal flow-induced interfacial deformation rectify the periodic motion of the swimmer, leading to locomotion. Such a strategy can be used to move toward, away from, and parallel to any deformable interface as long as the length scales involved are smaller than intrinsic scales, which we identify. A macro-scale experiment of flapping motion near a free surface illustrates this new result.

References in corpus (2)

• Soft lubrication
• Hydrodynamic lift on bound vesicles

Cited by in corpus (34)

• The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms
• Life around the scallop theorem
• Active colloids in complex fluids
• Enhanced diffusion by reciprocal swimming
• Leveraging Collective Effects in Externally Driven Colloidal Suspensions: Experiments and Simulations
• Enhanced motility of a microswimmer in rigid and elastic confinement
• Swimming in Complex Fluids
• Motility of small nematodes in disordered wet granular media
• Model microswimmers in channels with varying cross section
• A two-dimensional model of low-Reynolds number swimming beneath a free surface
• Lift at low Reynolds number
• A reciprocal theorem for the prediction of the normal force induced on a particle translating parallel to an elastic membrane
• The mechanism of propulsion of a model microswimmer in a viscoelastic fluid next to a solid boundary
• Jet propulsion without inertia
• An elastic two-sphere swimmer in Stokes flow
• Swimming near Deformable Membranes at Low Reynolds Number
• Surface microswimmers, harnessing the interface to self-propel
• Frequency-dependent higher-order Stokes singularities near a planar elastic boundary: implications for the hydrodynamics of an active microswimmer near an elastic interface
• Elastocapillary Levelling of Thin Viscous Films on Soft Substrates
• Influence of non-hydrodynamic forces on the elastic response of an ultra-thin soft coating under fluid-mediated dynamic loading
• Reorientation dynamics of microswimmers at fluid-fluid interfaces
• The hydrodynamics of slender swimmers near deformable interfaces
• Minimal two-sphere model of the generation of fluid flow at low Reynolds numbers
• A Fully Discrete Adjoint Method for Optimization of Flow Problems on Deforming Domains with Time-Periodicity Constraints
• Stirrers and movers actuated by oscillating fields
• Near and far-field hydrodynamic interaction of two chiral squirmers
• Viscous pumping inspired by flexible propulsion
• Using Surface-Motions for Locomotion of Microscopic Robots in Viscous Fluids
• Capillary lubrication of a spherical particle near a fluid interface
• FM-AFM with hanging fiber probe for the study of liquid / liquid interfaces
• Elastohydrodynamics of a soft coating under fluid-mediated loading by a spherical probe
• Stress-Based Navigation for Microscopic Robots in Viscous Fluids
• Complete analytic solution to Brownian unicycle dynamics
• Enhancement and Suppression of Active Particle Movement Due to Membrane Deformations