Abstract: The propulsion of micro-organisms by flagellar motions in the low Reynolds-number region has been a subject of renewed interest in recent years due to the growing attention to biomimetics that has opened up the prospect of many new bio-robotic appli­cations and to microfluidics that involve suspended macromolecules and biopolymers. We study the flow induced by the collective flagellar motion of bacterial carpets based on the method of regularized Stokeslets, which was designed to study the coupling of elastic struc­tures with fluid at zero Reynolds number. In particular, we model the flow generated by rotating helical flagella stuck to a surface immersed in a viscous dominated fluid. We ex­amine the properties of the flow field and thrust, and compare the numerical results with experimental data reported in the literature. Moreover, we examine the transport of particles of non-zero volume as well as fibers.

About the Speaker: Dr. Longhua Zhao is currently a tenure-track assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, USA. She obtained her bachelor degree from Shanxi University and master degree in Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences and her PhD in 2010 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. During her PhD work with Dr. R. Camassa and Dr. R. M. McLaughlin at UNC-CH, she carried out experimental and computational work to flow-structure interaction in viscous dominated flows, especially flow generated by nodal cilia. During her postdoc work with Dr. M. C. Calderer at the University of Minnesota, she focused on the study of phase transition in gels with two-phase model. More recently, she is working on flow induced by helical flagella.