Abstract
Recently, there has been renewed interest in the swimming of microorganisms for applications that include artificial swimmers, novel materials, drug delivery, and micro-robotics. Due to small length scales, the fluid mechanics of swimming of microorganisms are governed by low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. In such a regime, linear viscous forces dominate over nonlinear inertial forces. While our current understanding of locomotion at low Reynolds numbers is derived mainly from investigations in simple, Newtonian fluids (e.g., water), many of the fluids in which locomotion occurs contain solids and/or (biological) polymers that are instead not Newtonian. Examples include wet soils, human mucus, and fluids in the cervix and female reproductive track. A major challenge is to understand the propulsion mechanisms in fluids that display complex rheological behavior such as viscoelasticity and shear-thinning viscosity. Here, we will briefly review a few notable swimming experiments in Newtonian fluids and then discuss the latest experimental results on swimming in complex fluids, focusing on viscoelastic fluids.
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank David Gagnon, Nathan Keim, Arvind Gopinath, Alexander Leshansky, and Xiaoning Shen for help with the text and in drafting illustrations. This work was supported by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF grant nr. 2011323) and J. Sznitman was supported in part by the European Commission (FP7 Program) through a Career Integration Grant (PCIG09-GA-2011-293604). P.E. Arratia was supported in part by the Army Research Office through award W911NF-11-1-0488 and by NSF-CBET-Career Award.
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Sznitman, J., Arratia, P.E. (2015). Locomotion Through Complex Fluids: An Experimental View. In: Spagnolie, S. (eds) Complex Fluids in Biological Systems. Biological and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2065-5_7
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