The quest for designing new self-propelled colloids is fuelled by the demand for simple experimental models to study the collective behaviour of their more complex natural counterparts. Most synthetic self-propelled particles move by converting the input energy into translational motion. In this work we address the question if simple self-propelled spheres can assemble into more complex structures that exhibit rotational motion, possibly coupled with translational motion as in flagella. We exploit a combination of induced dipolar interactions and a bonding step to create permanent linear bead chains, composed of self-propelled Janus spheres, with a well-controlled internal structure. Next, we study how flexibility between individual swimmers in a chain can affect its swimming behaviour. Permanent rigid chains showed only active rotational or spinning motion, whereas longer semi-flexible chains showed both translational and rotational motion resembling flagella like-motion, in the presence of the fuel. Moreover, we are able to reproduce our experimental results using numerical calculations with a minimal model, which includes full hydrodynamic interactions with the fluid. Our method is general and opens a new way to design novel self-propelled colloids with complex swimming behaviours, using different complex starting building blocks in combination with the flexibility between them.

We derive general equations of motions for highly-confined particles that perform quasi-two-dimensional motion in Hele-Shaw channels, which we solve analytically, aiming to derive design principles for self-steering particles. Based on symmetry properties of a particle, its equations of motion can be simplified, where we retrieve an earlier-known equation of motion for the orientation of dimer particles consisting of disks (Uspal et al 2013 Nat. Commun. 4), but now in full generality. Subsequently, these solutions are compared with particle trajectories that are obtained numerically. For mirror-symmetric particles, excellent agreement between the analytical and numerical solutions is found. For particles lacking mirror symmetry, the analytic solutions provide means to classify the motion based on particle geometry, while we find that taking the side-wall interactions into account is important to accurately describe the trajectories.

We combine theory and numerical calculations to accurately predict the motion of anisotropic particles in shallow microfluidic channels, in which the particles are strongly confined in the vertical direction. We formulate an effective quasi-two-dimensional description of the Stokes flow around the particle via the Brinkman equation, which can be solved in a time that is two orders of magnitude faster than the three-dimensional problem. The computational speedup enables us to calculate the full trajectories of particles in the channel. To validate our scheme, we study the motion of dumbbell-shaped particles that are produced in a microfluidic channel using ‘continuous-flow lithography’. Contrary to what was reported in earlier work (Uspal et al. in Nat Commun 4:2666, 2013 ), we find that the reorientation time of a dumbbell particle in an external flow exhibits a minimum as a function of its disk size ratio. This finding is in excellent agreement with new experiments, thus confirming the predictive power of our scheme. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10404-018-2092-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Comprehensive understanding of particle motion in microfluidic devices is essential to unlock additional technologies for shape-based separation and sorting of microparticles like microplastics, cells, and crystal polymorphs. Such particles interact hydrodynamically with confining surfaces, thus altering their trajectories. These hydrodynamic interactions are shape dependent and can be tuned to guide a particle along a specific path. We produce strongly confined particles with various shapes in a shallow microfluidic channel via stop flow lithography. Regardless of their exact shape, particles with a single mirror plane have identical modes of motion: in-plane rotation and cross-stream translation along a bell-shaped path. Each mode has a characteristic time, determined by particle geometry. Furthermore, each particle trajectory can be scaled by its respective characteristic times onto two master curves. We propose minimalistic relations linking these timescales to particle shape. Together these master curves yield a trajectory universal to particles with a single mirror plane.

We combine a general formulation of microswimmer equations of motion with a numerical beadshell model to calculate the hydrodynamic interactions with the fluid, from which the swimming speed, power, and efficiency are extracted. From this framework, a generalized Scallop theorem emerges. The applicability to arbitrary shapes allows for the optimization of the efficiency with respect to the swimmer geometry. We apply this scheme to "three-body swimmers" of various shapes and find that the efficiency is characterized by the single-body friction coefficient in the long-arm regime, while in the short-arm regime the minimal approachable distance becomes the determining factor. Next, we apply this scheme to a biologically inspired set of swimmers that propel using a rotating helical flagellum. Interestingly, we find two distinct optimal shapes, one of which is fundamentally different from the shapes observed in nature (e.g., bacteria). Published by AIP Publishing.