Abstract
The recent progress in bioengineering has created great interest in the dynamics and manipulation of long, deformable macromolecules interacting with fluid flow. We report experimental data on the cross-flow migration, bending, and buckling of extremely deformable hydrogel nanofilaments conveyed by an oscillatory flow into a microchannel. The changes in migration velocity and filament orientation are related to the flow velocity and the filament’s initial position, deformation, and length. The observed migration dynamics of hydrogel filaments qualitatively confirms the validity of the previously developed worm-like bead-chain hydrodynamic model. The experimental data collected may help to verify the role of hydrodynamic interactions in molecular simulations of long molecular chains dynamics.
Highlights
The history of research on the lateral migration of particles in capillaries is a long one, inspired by the intriguing abnormality of blood flow characteristics [1,2,3]
The unique case of hydrogel nanofilaments buckled into Ushaped contour corresponds closely with the shape that actin filaments assume in a parabolic flow profile [26,28], shear flow [57], or when they are subjected to tension by myosin motors [58]
Even though the elastic mechanical properties of nanofilaments are in closer agreement with those of semiflexible actin filaments than DNA chains (Table 1), in the presence of hydrodynamic forces, hydrogel nanofilaments have the ability to mimic the behavior of both biopolymer types
Summary
The history of research on the lateral migration of particles in capillaries is a long one, inspired by the intriguing abnormality of blood flow characteristics [1,2,3]. Succeeding experimental and theoretical studies performed on the Poiseuille flow of solid [4,5,6,7] and liquid suspensions [8,9,10,11] have elucidated hydrodynamic mechanisms which are responsible for the characteristic crossflow migration of the suspended particles. This migration mechanism appears to depend on the particle deformability, viscosity ratio, initial position, and flow rate. The migration of semiflexible filaments (lp / L ~ 1) takes place preferably
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