Stochastic hydrodynamics of colonial microswimmers
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Authors
Ashenafi, Yonatan
Issue Date
2021-05
Type
Electronic thesis
Thesis
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Mathematics
Alternative Title
Abstract
Functions of microorganisms like looking for nutrition and biological processes such as infectionand reproduction are only possible due to micro-fluidic motion. Developments over the
past two decades in tracking and manipulation at the micro-fluidic level have made possible
accurate measurements of micro-hydrodynamical flows and have provided access to a wealth
of interesting biological and synthetic phenomena and a means to test the phenomena's
corresponding theories. This thesis focuses on these corresponding theories of micro-hydrodynamical phenomena.Our aim is to answer questions of individual and collective mobility for colonial microswimmers
and micro-rotors and of the fluid flows they generate. We wish to give analytical
expression to the individual aggregated swimmers' mobility statistics, and the environmental
interaction of these swimmers both with each other and with reactive proles such as
attractant chemicals. Our work is effectively split into three projects. The first research project focuses onthe statistical mobility properties of colonial microswimmers typified by an animal-like group
of protozoa called Choanoflagellates. The second research project focuses on the function of
multicellularity for the taxis and kinesis effectiveness of protozoa. Finally, the third research
project focuses on the stability and correlations of suspensions of micro-swimmers and microrotors.
In our investigations we applied fluid mechanical principles for the flow modeling and
insights from biophysical experiments for the swimmer modeling. We used asymptotic and
multi-scale methods for coarse graining the physical models and we compared the results from
these asymptotic derivations with Monte Carlo simulations and matrix-based computations
of the full models.
Description
May2021
School of Science
School of Science
Full Citation
Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY