Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 57: Poster - Diffusion

DY 57.12: Poster

Thursday, March 19, 2015, 16:00–18:00, Poster A

Numerical investigation of droplets driven by Marangoni flow — •Laura Stricker, Juergen Vollmer, and Stephan Herminghaus — Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS), Goettingen, Germany

The motion of artificial microswimmers can strikingly resemble collective motion in biological systems even though it only involves physical and chemical processes. A detailed understanding of their emergent swarming properties may therefore help to distinguish merely physics-related from biology-related aspects of motion in biological systems. In the present work, we focus on modelling a new type of artificial microswimmers, where propulsion is achieved by Marangoni flow. In particular, we characterize the parametric dependence of the motion and we address the propulsion mechanism. In order to do so, we developed a flexible CFD model based on a level set method, easily adaptable to different kinds of swimmers. We derived the flow field inside and outside individual droplets, and took into account the two-way coupling of the swimmers motion and the external flow. This allowed us to explore the dependence of propulsion on experimentally tunable parameters, like the droplet size and surfactant concentration. Future extensions of the present work will include the interactions between small numbers of swimmers, and the collective behavior of large assemblies, in the framework of a full multiscale approach