Designing phoretic micro- and nano-swimmers

Abstract

Small objects can swim by generating around them fields or gradients which in turn induce fluid motion past their surface by phoretic surface effects. We quantify for arbitrary swimmer shapes and surface patterns, how efficient swimming requires both surface ``activity'' to generate the fields, and surface ``phoretic mobility.'' We show in particular that (i) swimming requires symmetry breaking in either or both of the patterns of "activity" and ``mobility,'' and (ii) for a given geometrical shape and surface pattern, the swimming velocity is size-independent. In addition, for given available surface properties, our calculation framework provides a guide for optimizing the design of swimmers.

References in corpus (1)

• Propulsion of a molecular machine by asymmetric distribution of reaction--products

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms
• Self-motile colloidal particles: from directed propulsion to random walk
• Analytic results for the three-sphere swimmer at low Reynolds number
• Mechanical Response of a Small Swimmer Driven by Conformational Transitions
• Three-Sphere Low Reynolds Number Swimmer with a Cargo Container