Life at high Deborah number

By Eric Lauga. 2008

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In many biological systems, microorganisms swim through complex polymeric fluids, and usually deform the medium at a rate faster than the inverse fluid relaxation time. We address the basic properties of such life at high Deborah number analytically by considering the small-amplitude swimming of a body in an arbitrary complex fluid. Using asymptotic analysis and differential geometry, we show that for a given swimming gait, the time-averaged leading-order swimming kinematics of the body can be expressed as an integral equation on the solution to a series of simpler Newtonian problems. We then use our results to demonstrate that Purcell's scallop theorem, which states that time-reversible body motion cannot be used for locomotion in a Newtonian fluid, breaks down in polymeric fluid environments.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/95b3bd04769ed951e4fafdfde9a79918acf8f219

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Waving transport and propulsion in a generalized Newtonian fluid (2013, methodology): “Furthermore, this model, which is originally due to Taylor [24], is amenable to perturbation analysis and allows to incorporate certain non-Newtonian effects in a systematic fashion [12,15].”
Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids (2021, background): “A squirmer driven by small-amplitude oscillating slip velocities also shows a similar speed dependence on De in a viscoelastic fluid [90,91].”