Issue |
EPL
Volume 142, Number 2, April 2023
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 27001 | |
Number of page(s) | 7 | |
Section | Biological and soft matter physics | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/acc8f8 | |
Published online | 13 April 2023 |
Birotor hydrodynamic microswimmers: From single to collective behaviour(a)
Institute of Biological Information Processing, Forschungszentrum Jülich - 52425 Jülich, Germany
(b) E-mail: m.ripoll@fz-juelich.de (corresponding author)
Received: 1 March 2023
Accepted: 30 March 2023
A microswimmer composed of two oppositely rotating strongly coupled colloids in solution is here termed as birotor and investigated by means of hydrodynamic simulations. The related flow fields, swimmer velocities, and rotational diffusion are controlled by the properties of the fluid, the swimmer geometry, rotation frequency, and also by the substrate friction. Resulting from mutual hydrodynamic and steric interactions, birotor pairs might follow one another, or more frequently rotate around each other. For larger number of interacting swimmers the continuous formation and dissolution of small and rotating aggregates dominates the collective dynamics. The birotors motion is hydrodynamically enhanced at short distances, such that the average velocity of the swimmers shows to increase with density for the investigated range of densities. This is compensated by a decrease of rotational diffusive time, making that the overall effective diffusion decreases with density. These results constitute the first systematic analysis of the birotor microswimmer, which could be also further modified as an easy to manipulate active particle for various potential applications.
© 2023 The author(s)
Published by the EPLA under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.