Guiding microscale swimmers using teardrop-shaped posts.
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Authors
Zhong, Xiao
Tong, Jiajun
Adachi, Takuji
Liu, Yanpeng
Ristroph, Leif
Ward, Michael D
Shelley, Michael J
Zhang, Jun
Publication Date
2017-07-21Journal Title
Soft Matter
ISSN
1744-683X
Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
Volume
13
Issue
27
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Davies Wykes, M. S., Zhong, X., Tong, J., Adachi, T., Liu, Y., Ristroph, L., Ward, M. D., et al. (2017). Guiding microscale swimmers using teardrop-shaped posts.. Soft Matter, 13 (27) https://doi.org/10.1039/c7sm00203c
Abstract
The swimming direction of biological or artificial microscale swimmers tends to be randomised over long time-scales by thermal fluctuations. Bacteria use various strategies to bias swimming behaviour and achieve directed motion against a flow, maintain alignment with gravity or travel up a chemical gradient. Herein, we explore a purely geometric means of biasing the motion of artificial nanorod swimmers. These artificial swimmers are bimetallic rods, powered by a chemical fuel, which swim on a substrate printed with teardrop-shaped posts. The artificial swimmers are hydrodynamically attracted to the posts, swimming alongside the post perimeter for long times before leaving. The rods experience a higher rate of departure from the higher curvature end of the teardrop shape, thereby introducing a bias into their motion. This bias increases with swimming speed and can be translated into a macroscopic directional motion over long times by using arrays of teardrop-shaped posts aligned along a single direction. This method provides a protocol for concentrating swimmers, sorting swimmers according to different speeds, and could enable artificial swimmers to transport cargo to desired locations.
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/c7sm00203c
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/286792
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