Designing phoretic micro- and nano-swimmers

By R. Golestanian, T. Liverpool, Armand Ajdari. 2007

578 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3aefb5329544a4b08d5d6ca20d03ec3d32d65392

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In Aerospace Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Tuned, driven, and active soft matter (2015, background): “self-propulsion via diffusiophoretic effects analogous to the case of thermophoresis [363].”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “Therefore, if a particle generates its own local gradient, a self-phoretic motion can take place (Golestanian et al., 2007).”
Active Brownian particles (2012, methodology): “This was theoretically investigated using simplified models by Golestanian et al [138,139], as well as detailed molecular dynamics simulations by Kapral and co-workers [295,335].”
The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms (2008, background): “The final category of artificial swimmers use chemical reactions to power locomotion, a case investigated both experimentally [291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 281, 267, 297] and theoretically [298, 299, 300].”
Particle motion driven by solute gradients with application to autonomous motion: continuum and colloidal perspectives (2010, background): “…autonomous motion, but simply supposing that the phoretic velocity formula, (3.34), which is based on the presumption of a ‘imposed’ global concentration gradient and associated back-flow pressure gradient, can be used without derivation (Golestanian et al. 2005, 2007) is not justified.”