Spontaneous autophoretic motion of isotropic particles

By S. Michelin, Eric Lauga, Denis Bartolo. 2012

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Suspended colloidal particles interacting chemically with a solute can self-propel by autophoretic motion when they are asymmetrically patterned (Janus colloids). Here we demonstrate theoretically that such anisotropy is not necessary for locomotion and that the nonlinear interplay between surface osmotic flows and solute advection can produce spontaneous and self-sustained motion of isotropic particles. Solving the classical autophoretic framework for isotropic particles, we show that, for given material properties, there exists a critical particle size (or Peclet number) above which spontaneous symmetry-breaking and autophoretic motion occur. A hierarchy of instabilities is further identified for quantized critical Peclet numbers.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd49ff6678755b20bf271ca3bb2b2227069c6786

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. T. Pedley
2. S. Michelin
3. Eric Lauga
4. David Saintillan
5. Takuji Ishikawa
6. Olivier Doaré
7. Lailai Zhu

Citations in the corpus

• Spherical squirmers: models for swimming micro-organisms (2016, background): “A corresponding increase in effective viscosity predicted for suspensions of pullers is also consistent with experiments on motile algae by Rafai et al. (2010). However, these effects, although extremely interesting, require that the cells’ orientation distribution becomes markedly anisotropic in an”
• Self-Propulsion of Chemically Active Droplets (2022, background): “…advection-diffusion model for the bulk transport of a chemical solute emitted from the surface of the moving active droplet into the outer fluid (Michelin et al. 2013, Morozov & Michelin 2019a), that www.annualreviews.org • Self-propulsion of chemically-active droplets 9 has served as a…”
• Phoretic self-propulsion at finite Péclet numbers (2014, background): “In order to induce non-trivial tangential chemical gradients and slip velocities, anisotropic properties of the particle surface are essential for small particles [18, 19] and isotropic particles cannot swim unless they are large enough for a symmetry-breaking instability involving advection of the ”