Dynamics of microswimmers near a liquid-liquid interface with viscosity difference

TL;DR

This study models the behavior of microswimmers near a liquid-liquid interface with different viscosities, revealing reorientation towards lower viscosity regions and novel hovering motions, extending understanding beyond equal-viscosity systems.

Contribution

It introduces a new model for microswimmer dynamics at viscous interfaces with differing viscosities, highlighting reorientation and hovering behaviors not previously documented.

Findings

Swimmers reorient towards lower viscosity fluids.

Discovery of hovering motion parallel to the interface.

Behavior extends known swimming patterns to viscous interfaces.

Abstract

Transport of material across liquid interfaces is ubiquitous for living cells and is also a crucial step in drug delivery and in many industrial processes. The fluids that are present on either side of the interfaces will usually have different viscosities. We present a physical model for the dynamics of microswimmers near a soft and penetrable interface that we solve using computer simulations of Navier-Stokes flows. The literature contains studies of similar isoviscous fluid systems, where the two fluids have the same viscosity. Here we extend this to the more general case where they have different viscosities. We investigate the effect of the fluid viscosity ratio on the movement patterns of microswimmers. We find that swimmers systematically reorientate towards the region containing the lower viscosity fluid. Ultimately this is expected to drive the swimmers to behave as if they are more inclined to swim in low viscosity fluids. Furthermore, in addition to the types of swimming already reported in the isoviscous system, i.e. bouncing, sliding and penetrating, we observed a hovering motion, in which strong pullers swim parallel to the interface with a certain distance, which is consistent with the dynamics of such swimmers near the solid wall.