Abstract
The authors perform mesoscale hydrodynamics simulations of spheroidal squirmers and show an enhanced wall and center depletion, and alignment of the propulsion direction parallel to the flow, which they interpret as a preferred downstream swimming for all active stresses,
Highlights
The swimming behavior of motile microorganisms is determined by the response to external fields such as gravity, chemical or thermal gradients, geometrical restrictions, or flow fields
Wall hydrodynamic interactions, active stress, thermal fluctuations, and shape determine the transport of squirmers in channels
An increasing flow rate leads to squirmer depletion at walls, and for high flow rates, a density maximum appears in a shear-trapping region between the wall and channel center
Summary
The swimming behavior of motile microorganisms is determined by the response to external fields such as gravity, chemical or thermal gradients, geometrical restrictions, or flow fields. A paradigmatic example is E. coli bacteria, which exhibit positive rheotaxis (upstream swimming) in channel flows [13,16,17,33,34,35] and are able to invade medical devices [16] These studies provide valuable insight into various aspects of swimming of biological microorganisms in the vicinity of walls and under flow. Thermal fluctuations destroy the theoretically predicted stable trajectories, fixed points, and limit cycles This severely changes the squirmers’ rheotactic behavior, and spherical pushers predominantly swim downstream rather than upstream, in contrast to analytical predictions at low flow rates [7].
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