Guiding microscale swimmers using teardrop-shaped posts.


Type
Article
Change log
Authors
Davies Wykes, Megan S  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0316-0432
Zhong, Xiao 
Tong, Jiajun 
Adachi, Takuji 
Liu, Yanpeng 
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.

Description
Keywords
cond-mat.soft, cond-mat.soft
Journal Title
Soft Matter
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
1744-683X
1744-6848
Volume Title
13
Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)