Squirming through shear-thinning fluids

By Charu Datt, Lailai Zhu, Gwynn J. Elfring, On Shun Pak. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2015

109 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many micro-organisms find themselves immersed in fluids displaying non-Newtonian rheological properties such as viscoelasticity and shear-thinning viscosity. The effects of viscoelasticity on swimming at low Reynolds numbers have already received considerable attention, but much less is known about swimming in shear-thinning fluids. A general understanding of the fundamental question of how shear-thinning rheology influences swimming still remains elusive. To probe this question further, we study a spherical squirmer in a shear-thinning fluid using a combination of asymptotic analysis and numerical simulations. Shear-thinning rheology is found to affect a squirming swimmer in non-trivial and surprising ways; we predict and show instances of both faster and slower swimming depending on the surface actuation of the squirmer. We also illustrate that while a drag and thrust decomposition can provide insights into swimming in Newtonian fluids, extending this intuition to problems in complex media can prove problematic.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d6a1b7ca83bade0ed1a3614dcb2a103572a0062a

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids (2021, background): “5e) and causes two effects: a local confinement of the swimmer, which enhances the swimming speed [114,161], and reduction of fluid forces which tends to hinder locomotion [158,160,162].”