Salima Rafaï

Effective viscosity of microswimmer suspensions.

The measurement of a quantitative and macroscopic parameter to estimate the global motility of a large population of swimming biological cells is a challenge. Experiments on the rheology of active suspensions have been performed. Effective viscosity of sheared suspensions of live unicellular motile microalgae (Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii) is far greater than for suspensions containing the same volume fraction of dead cells. In addition, suspensions show shear thinning behavior. We relate these macroscopic measurements to the orientation of individual swimming cells under flow and discuss our results in the light of several existing models.

Salt Crystallization during Evaporation: Impact of Interfacial Properties

Salt damage in stone results in part from crystallization of salts during drying. We study the evaporation of aqueous salt solutions and the crystallization growth for sodium sulfate and sodium chloride in model situations: evaporating droplets and evaporation from square capillaries. The results show that the interfacial properties are of key importance for where and how the crystals form. The consequences for the different forms of salt crystallization observed in practice are discussed.

Spreading of non newtonian fluids on hydrophilic surfaces

.Herewestudythespreadingof non-Newtonian liquids, focusing on the two most common non-Newtonian flowproperties, a shear-rate dependence of the viscosity and the existence of normalstresses. For the former, the spreading behaviour is found not to deviate strongly fromTanner’s law. This is quite surprising given that, within the lubrication approximation,itcanbeshownthatthecontactlinesingularitydisappearsduetotheshear-dependentviscosity. The experiments are compared with the predictions of the lubrication theoryof power-law fluids. If normal stresses are present, again only small deviations fromTanner’s law are found in the experiment. This can be understood by comparingviscous and normal stress contributions to the spreading; it turns out that onlylogarithmic corrections to Tanner’s law survive, which are nonetheless visible in theexperiment.

Light Control of the Flow of Phototactic Microswimmer Suspensions

Some microalgae are sensitive to light intensity gradients. This property is known as phototaxis: The algae swim toward a light source (positive phototaxis). We use this property to control the motion of microalgae within a Poiseuille flow using light. The combination of flow vorticity and phototaxis results in a concentration of algae around the center of the flow. Intermittent light exposure allows analysis of the dynamics of this phenomenon and its reversibility. With this phenomenon, we hope to pave the way toward new algae concentration techniques (a bottleneck challenge in biofuel algal production) and toward the improvement of pollutant biodetector technology.

Random walk of a swimmer in a low-Reynolds-number medium.

Swimming at a micrometer scale demands particular strategies. Indeed when inertia is negligible as compared to viscous forces (i.e. Reynolds number

Amoeboid motion in confined geometry.

Re

Effective viscosity of non-gravitactic Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii microswimmer suspensions

is lower than unity), hydrodynamics equations are reversible in time. To achieve propulsion at low Reynolds number, swimmers must then deform in a way that is not invariant under time reversal. Here, we investigate dispersal properties of self propelled organisms by means of microscopy and cell tracking. Our system of interest is the micro-alga \textit{Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii}, a motile single celled green alga about 10 micrometers in diameter that swims with to two front flagella. In the case of dilute suspensions, we show that tracked trajectories are well modeled by a correlated random walk. This process is based on short time correlations in the direction of movement called persistence. At longer times, correlations are lost and a standard random walk characterizes the trajectories. Moreover, high speed imaging enables us to show how the back-and-forth motion of flagella at very short times affects the statistical description of the dynamics. Finally we show how drag forces modify the characteristics of this particular random walk.

Amoeboid swimming in a channel

Many eukaryotic cells undergo frequent shape changes (described as amoeboid motion) that enable them to move forward. We investigate the effect of confinement on a minimal model of amoeboid swimmer. A complex picture emerges: (i) The swimmers nature (i.e., either pusher or puller) can be modified by confinement, thus suggesting that this is not an intrinsic property of the swimmer. This swimming nature transition stems from intricate internal degrees of freedom of membrane deformation. (ii) The swimming speed might increase with increasing confinement before decreasing again for stronger confinements. (iii) A straight amoeoboid swimmers trajectory in the channel can become unstable, and ample lateral excursions of the swimmer prevail. This happens for both pusher- and puller-type swimmers. For weak confinement, these excursions are symmetric, while they become asymmetric at stronger confinement, whereby the swimmer is located closer to one of the two walls. In this study, we combine numerical and theoretical analyses.

Pattern formation by dewetting and evaporating sedimenting suspensions

Active microswimmers are known to affect the macroscopic viscosity of suspensions in a more complex manner than passive particles. For puller-like microswimmers an increase in the viscosity has been observed. It has been suggested that the persistence of the orientation of the microswimmers hinders the rotation that is normally caused by the vorticity. It was previously shown that some sorts of algae are bottom-heavy swimmers, i.e., their centre of mass is not located in the centre of the body. In this way, the algae affect the vorticity of the flow when they are perpendicularly oriented to the axis of gravity. This orientation of gravity to vorticity is given in a rheometer that is equipped with a cone-plate geometry. Here we present measurements of the viscosity both in a cone-plate and a Taylor-Couette cell. The two set-ups yielded the same increase in viscosity although the axis of gravitation in the Taylor-Couette cell is parallel to the direction of vorticity. In a complementary experiment we tested the orientation of the direction of swimming through microscopic observation of single Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and could not identify a preferred orientation, i.e., our specific strain of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii are not bottom-heavy swimmers. We thus conclude that bottom heaviness is not a prerequisite for the increase of viscosity and that the effect of gravity on the rheology of our strain of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is negligible. This finding reopens the question of whether the origin of persistence in the orientation of cells is actually responsible for the increased viscosity of the suspension.

Photofocusing: Light and flow of phototactic microswimmer suspension.

Several micro-organisms, such as bacteria, algae, or spermatozoa, use flagellar or ciliary activity to swim in a fluid, while many other micro-organisms instead use ample shape deformation, described as amoeboid, to propel themselves either by crawling on a substrate or swimming. Many eukaryotic cells were believed to require an underlying substratum to migrate (crawl) by using membrane deformation (like blebbing or generation of lamellipodia) but there is now increasing evidence that a large variety of cells (including those of the immune system) can migrate without the assistance of focal adhesion, allowing them to swim as efficiently as they can crawl. This paper details the analysis of amoeboid swimming in a confined fluid by modeling the swimmer as an inextensible membrane deploying local active forces (with zero total force and torque). The swimmer displays a rich behavior: it may settle into a straight trajectory in the channel or navigate from one wall to the other depending on its confinement. The nature of the swimmer is also found to be affected by confinement: the swimmer can behave, on average over one swimming cycle, as a pusher at low confinement, and becomes a puller at higher confinement, or vice versa. The swimmers nature is thus not an intrinsic property. The scaling of the swimmer velocity V with the force amplitude A is analyzed in detail showing that at small enough A, V∼A(2)/η(2) (where η is the viscosity of the ambient fluid), whereas at large enough A, V is independent of the force and is determined solely by the stroke cycle frequency and the swimmer size. This finding starkly contrasts with models where motion is based on ciliary and flagellar activity, where V∼A/η. To conclude, two definitions of efficiency as put forward in the literature are analyzed with distinct outcomes. We find that one type of efficiency has an optimum as a function of confinement while the other does not. Future perspectives are outlined.