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Oleg Trosman

Publications and source records attributed to Oleg Trosman.

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Regimes of motion of magnetocapillary swimmers

The dynamics of a triangular magnetocapillary swimmer is studied using the lattice Boltzmann method. Performing extensive numerical simulations taking into account the coupled dynamics of the fluid-fluid interface and of magnetic particles floating on it and driven by external magnetic fields we identify several regimes of the swimmer motion. In the regime of high frequencies the swimmer's maximum velocity is centered around the particle's inverse coasting time. Modifying the ratio of surface tension and magnetic forces allows to study the swimmer propagation in the regime of significantly lower frequencies mainly defined by the strength of the magnetocapillary potential. Finally, introducing a constant magnetic contribution in each of the particles in addition to their magnetic moment induced by external fields leads to another regime characterised by strong in-plane swimmer reorientations that resemble experimental observations.

cond-mat.soft

The Scallop Theorem and Swimming at the Mesoscale

By synergistically combining modeling, simulation and experiments, we show that there exists a regime of self-propulsion in which the inertia in the fluid dynamics can be separated from that of the swimmer. This is demonstrated by the motion of an asymmetric dumbbell that, despite deforming in a reciprocal fashion, self-propagates in a fluid due to a non-reciprocal Stokesian flow field. The latter arises from the difference in the coasting times of the two constitutive beads. This asymmetry acts as a second degree of freedom, recovering the scallop theorem at the mesoscopic scale.

physics.flu-dyn

Optimal motion of triangular magnetocapillary swimmers

A system of ferromagnetic particles trapped at a liquid-liquid interface and subjected to a set of magnetic fields (magnetocapillary swimmers) is studied numerically using a hybrid method combining the pseudopotential lattice Boltzmann method and the discrete element method. After investigating the equilibrium properties of a single, two and three particles at the interface, we demonstrate a controlled motion of the swimmer formed by three particles. It shows a sharp dependence of the average center-of-mass speed on the frequency of the time-dependent external magnetic field. Inspired by experiments on magnetocapillary microswimmers, we interpret the obtained maxima of the swimmer speed by the optimal frequency centered around the characteristic relaxation time of a spherical particle. It is also shown that the frequency corresponding to the maximum speed grows and the maximum average speed decreases with increasing inter-particle distances at moderate swimmer sizes. The findings of our lattice Boltzmann simulations are supported by bead-spring model calculations.

cond-mat.soft

Microswimming with inertia

Microswimmers, especially in theoretical treatments, are generally taken to be completely inertia-free, since inertial effects on their motion are typically small and assuming their absence simplifies the problem considerably. Yet in nature there is no discrete break between swimmers for which inertia is negligibly small and for which it is detectable. Here we study a microswimming model for which the effect of inertia is calculated explicitly in the regime of transition between the Stokesian and the non-Stokesian flow limits, which we term the intermediate regime. The model in the inertialess limit is the bead-spring swimmer. We first show that in the intermediate regime a mechanical microswimmer exhibits damped inertial coasting like an underdamped harmonic oscillator. We then calculate analytically the swimmer's velocity by including a mass-acceleration term in the equations of motion which are otherwise based on the Stokes flow. We show that this hybrid treatment combining aspects of underdamped and overdamped dynamics provides an accurate description of the motion in the intermediate regime, as verified here by comparison to simulations using the lattice Boltzmann method, and is a significant improvement over the results from the inertialess theory when either the mass of the swimmer or the forces driving its motion is/are large enough.

cond-mat.soft