arXiv subjects

Mirko Residori

Publications and source records attributed to Mirko Residori.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Disorder-induced persistent random motion and trapping of microswimmers

Microorganisms ofter move in confined, disordered environments, where hydrodynamic couplings can modify their transport behavior. Using extensive finite-element simulations, we investigate the dynamics of microswimmers -- modeled as squirmers -- in two-dimensional disordered porous media by resolving the full hydrodynamic interactions. We reveal that the deterministic coupling between activity, hydrodynamics, and disorder is sufficient to generate effective diffusive transport. Strong pushers and pullers become localised in the porous medium either by trapping at corners or dynamic trapping, depending on swimmer type and obstacle packing fraction. Squirmers can escape from dynamic traps, leading to a prominent ``hopping-and--trapping'' dynamics. Strikingly, we find a pusher-puller asymmetry in the trapping probability that can be reversed by short-range swimmer-obstacle interactions, highlighting the sensitivity of transport to near-field effects.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2025

Vorticity-induced surfing and trapping in porous media

Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous flows in dense porous channels. We find that swimming always slows down the traversal of agents across the channel, giving rise to robust power-law tails of their exit-time distributions. These exit-time distributions collapse onto a universal master curve with a scaling exponent of $\approx 3/2$ across a wide range of packing fractions and motility parameters, which can be rationalized by a scaling relation. We further identify a new motility pattern where agents alternate between surfing along fast streams and extended trapping phases, the latter determining the power-law exponent. Unexpectedly, trapping occurs in the flow backbone itself -- not only at obstacle boundaries -- due to vorticity-induced reorientation in the highly-heterogeneous fluid environment. These findings provide a fundamentally new active transport mechanism with direct implications for biofilm clogging and the design of novel microrobots capable of operating in heterogeneous media.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2024

Flow Through Porous Media at the Percolation Transition

We study low-Reynolds-number fluid flow through a two-dimensional porous medium modeled as a Lorentz gas. Using extensive finite element simulations we fully resolve the flow fields for packing fractions approaching the percolation threshold. Near the percolation transition, we find a power-law scaling of the flow rate versus the pressure drop with an exponent of $\approx 5/2$, which has been predicted earlier by mapping the macroscopic flow to a discrete flow network [Phys. Rev. Lett. 54, 1985]. Importantly, we observe a rounding of the scaling behavior at small system sizes, which can be rationalized via a finite-size scaling ansatz. Finally, we show that the distribution of the kinetic energy exhibits a power-law scaling over several decades at small energies, originating from collections of self-similar, viscous eddies in the dead-end-channels. Our results lay the foundation for unraveling critical behavior of complex fluids omnipresent in biological and geophysical systems.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2023

The influence of finite size particles on fluid velocity and transport though porous media

Understanding the coupling between flow, hydrodynamic transport and dispersion of colloids with finite-size in porous media is a long-standing challenge. This problem is relevant for a broad range of natural and engineered subsurface processes, including contaminant and colloidal transport, mixing of bio-chemical compounds, kinetics of reactions and groundwater bio-remediation, but also transport phenomena related to different systems like membranes, or blood flow. While classical models for colloidal transport rely on macro-dispersion theory and do not take into consideration the complex and heterogeneous structure of the porous host medium, recent studies take into consideration the detailed structure of the porous system and its impact on the fluid velocity. However, the impact of confinement condition, represented by the ratio of particles radius $a$ and pore throat size $λ$, has been overlooked. Here, we use numerical simulations of fluid particle dynamics in resolved porous media to demonstrate that particles confinement affects the fluid macroscopic velocity field u which in turn affects the particles transport itself. Our results show that even for small confinement conditions ($a/λ\sim 2$~\%), fluid and transported particles are dynamically re-routed towards more permeable paths. This leads to the emergence of ephemeral laminar vortexes at pore throat entrances and affects the variance and mean fluid velocity.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2021

A pseudo-spectral Strang splitting method for linear dispersive problems with transparent boundary conditions

The present work proposes a second-order time splitting scheme for a linear dispersive equation with a variable advection coefficient subject to transparent boundary conditions. For its spatial discretization, a dual Petrov--Galerkin method is considered which gives spectral accuracy. The main difficulty in constructing a second-order splitting scheme in such a situation lies in the compatibility condition at the boundaries of the sub-problems. In particular, the presence of an inflow boundary condition in the advection part results in order reduction. To overcome this issue a modified Strang splitting scheme is introduced that retains second-order accuracy. For this numerical scheme a stability analysis is conducted. In addition, numerical results are shown to support the theoretical derivations.

math.NA↗

arXiv2021

An exponential integrator/WENO discretization for sonic-boom simulation on modern computer hardware

Recently a splitting approach has been presented for the simulation of sonic-boom propagation. Splitting methods allow one to divide complicated partial differential equations into simpler parts that are solved by specifically tailored numerical schemes. The present work proposes a second order exponential integrator for the numerical solution of sonic-boom propagation modelled through a dispersive equation with Burgers' nonlinearity. The linear terms are efficiently solved in frequency space through FFT, while the nonlinear terms are efficiently solved by a WENO scheme. The numerical method is designed to be highly parallelisable and therefore takes full advantage of modern computer hardware. The new approach also improves the accuracy compared to the splitting method and it reduces oscillations. The enclosed numerical results illustrate that parallelisation on a CPU results in a speedup of 22 times faster than the straightforward sequential version. The GPU implementation further accelerates the runtime by a factor 3, which improves to 5 when single precision is used instead of double precision.

math.NA↗

arXiv2019

A pseudo-spectral splitting method for linear dispersive problems with transparent boundary conditions

The goal of the present work is to solve a linear dispersive equation with variable coefficient advection on an unbounded domain. In this setting, transparent boundary conditions are vital to allow waves to leave (or even re-enter) the, necessarily finite, computational domain. To obtain an efficient numerical scheme we discretize space using a spectral method. This allows us to drastically reduce the number of grid points required for a given accuracy. Applying a fully implicit time integrator, however, would require us to invert full matrices. This is addressed by performing an operator splitting scheme and only treating the third order differential operator, stemming from the dispersive part, implicitly; this approach can also be interpreted as an implicit-explicit scheme. However, the fact that the transparent boundary conditions are non-homogeneous and depend implicitly on the numerical solution presents a significant obstacle for the splitting/pseudo-spectral approach investigated here. We show how to overcome these difficulties and demonstrate the proposed numerical scheme by performing a number of numerical simulations.

math.NA↗