Orientational order in concentrated suspensions of spherical microswimmers

2011/11/01 by Arthur A. Evans, Takuji Ishikawa, Takami Yamaguchi +1 · 3 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Materials and Mechanics #Micro and Nano Robotics #Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence #cond-mat.soft

paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.3660268

published as Phys. Fluids 23, 111702 (2011)

openalex publication_date 2011/11/01 · arxiv created 2013/02/10 · arxiv updated 2013/02/12 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We use numerical simulations to probe the dynamics of concentrated suspensions of spherical microswimmers interacting hydrodynamically. Previous work in the dilute limit predicted orientational instabilities of aligned suspensions for both pusher and puller swimmers, which we confirm computationally. Unlike previous work, we show that isotropic suspensions of spherical swimmers are also always unstable. Both types of initial conditions develop long-time polar order of a nature which depends on the hydrodynamic signature of the swimmer but very weakly on the volume fraction up to very high volume fractions.

Citations

• Fluid Mechanics of Propulsion by Cilia and Flagella
• The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms

Cited by

• Tuned, driven, and active soft matter
• Dynamic Clustering and Chemotactic Collapse of Self-Phoretic Active Particles
• Getting drowned in a swirl: Deformable bead-spring model microswimmers in external flow fields

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