Propulsion of a molecular machine by asymmetric distribution of reaction products.

By R. Golestanian, T. Liverpool, A. Ajdari. Physical Review Letters, 2005

622 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A simple model for the reaction-driven propulsion of a small device is proposed as a model for (part of) a molecular machine in aqueous media. The motion of the device is driven by an asymmetric distribution of reaction products. The propulsive velocity of the device is calculated as well as the scale of the velocity fluctuations. The effects of hydrodynamic flow as well as a number of different scenarios for the kinetics of the reaction are addressed.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf50b9c38adb39cb543d1caa6d2a9d27b7550b6e

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “electric colloids are partially coated with thin layers of catalytic materials like Pt or palladium (Pd) (Golestanian et al., 2005).”
Phoretic self-propulsion at finite Péclet numbers (2014, background): “These so-called Janus particles are typically axisymmetric and have been the focus of most experimental, theoretical and numerical studies on autophoretic particles [11, 18, 19, 21, 23, 37].”
Multiparticle Collision Dynamics: Simulation of Complex Systems on Mesoscales (2008, background): “Other motor models include coupled objects with asymmetric shapes residing in heat baths with different temperatures [113], swimmers composed of linked beads that undergo irreversible cyclic conformational changes [114], and motors that utilize an asymmetric distribution of reaction products in comb”
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.”