Bulletin of the American Physical Society
76th Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics
Sunday–Tuesday, November 19–21, 2023; Washington, DC
Session T09: Biofluids: Collective Behavior and Active Matter III
4:25 PM–6:09 PM,
Monday, November 20, 2023
Room: 140A
Chair: David Murphy, University of South Florida
Abstract: T09.00002 : Morphodynamics of active drops*
4:38 PM–4:51 PM
Presenter:
Alejandro Martinez-Calvo
(Princeton University)
Authors:
Alejandro Martinez-Calvo
(Princeton University)
Sujit S Datta
(Princeton University)
While the shape and flow inside slender drops resting on boundaries and thin films have been extensively studied using lubrication theory, less is known about drops of any aspect ratio where slender theory is not applicable. To address this gap in knowledge, we perform full time-dependent simulations of an active drop on a solid substrate, which exhibits nematic order due to anchoring at both the solid boundary and the drop's interface. We consider purely viscous flow and either extensile or contractile nematic stress, in which the orientational field undergoes pure relaxational behavior towards a minimum free energy state.We find that the drop reaches a stable steady state in which viscous, surface tension, and active forces are in balance. The type of active stress (extensile or contractile), the anchoring angle, and the active Capillary number (which compares the strength of active stresses with capillary pressure) play crucial roles in determining the distinct complex flows and shapes of the drop. These flows and shapes cannot be predicted by lubrication theory, which only gives a unique shape for a given Capillary number. Moreover, when symmetry is broken due to the anchoring, we find that the velocity and mixing inside the drop is maximized.
Overall, our work provides a deeper understanding of active drops, which could be relevant to various biological processes involving tissue morphodynamics and cellular flows, and could inspire new experiments on active materials.
*A.M.-C. acknowledges support from the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science and the Human Frontier Science Program through the grant LT000035/2021-C. S.S.D. acknowledges support from NSF grants CBET-1941716, DMR-2011750, and EF-2124863, as well as the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund, New Jersey Health Foundation, and Pew Biomedical Scholars Program.
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