Squirmers with swirl: a model for Volvox swimming

Squirmers with swirl: a model for Volvox swimming

Colonies of the green alga Volvox are spheres that swim through the beating of pairs of flagella on their surface somatic cells. The somatic cells themselves are mounted rigidly in a polymeric extracellular matrix, fixing the orientation of the flagella so that they beat approximately in a meridional plane, with axis of symmetry in the swimming direction, but with a roughly [Formula: see text] ...

Dancing volvox: hydrodynamic bound states of swimming algae.

The spherical alga Volvox swims by means of flagella on thousands of surface somatic cells. This geometry and its large size make it a model organism for studying the fluid dynamics of multicellularity. Remarkably, when two nearby Volvox colonies swim close to a solid surface, they attract one another and can form stable bound states in which they "waltz" or "minuet" around each other. A surfac...

investigating the feasibility of a proposed model for geometric design of deployable arch structures

deployable scissor type structures are composed of the so-called scissor-like elements (sles), which are connected to each other at an intermediate point through a pivotal connection and allow them to be folded into a compact bundle for storage or transport. several sles are connected to each other in order to form units with regular polygonal plan views. the sides and radii of the polygons are...

Local Controllability for a ''Swimming'' Model

Volvox

What is Volvox? The name comes from the Latin volvere, to roll, and ox, as in atrox, fierce. Volvox is a spherical multicellular green alga, which contains many small biflagellate somatic cells and a few large, non-motile reproductive cells called gonidia, and swims with a characteristic rolling motion. Ever since van Leeuwenhoek first viewed these algal ‘fierce rollers’ with utter fascination ...