Collaborative Research: The Analysis and Simulation of Biologically Active Suspensions

合作研究：生物活性悬浮液的分析与模拟

• 批准号: 0920931
• 负责人: David Saintillan
• 金额: $ 29.04万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-01 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0920931&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Analysis; Simulation; Biologically

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Biologically active suspensions, of which a bath of swimming bacteria is a paradigmatic example, are fluid systems whose microstructure is alive and motile. As the system's "active particles" propel themselves through the surrounding fluid, they produce disturbance flows that communicate their motions to other swimmers, thereby altering their swimming direction and speed. This reciprocal interaction can result in correlated, large-scale, and complex fluid flows that move on length- and time-scales much larger than those of any single swimmer. These swimmer-driven flows have important implications for the evolution and survival of micro-organismal colonies, as they impact nutrient delivery through both particle transport and fluid mixing, and may also play a role in other important phenomena such as quorum sensing and biofilm formation. They are also fundamental examples of non-equilibrium pattern-forming systems. In this project, we propose to further deepen our understanding of biologically active suspensions using a combination of analytical models and numerical simulations. The research will focus on the modeling and analysis of the coherent structures that arise in these systems and on their relation to fluid mixing. Specifically the effect of boundaries and boundary conditions, confinement, and system scale will be examined. New multiscale approaches allowing hundreds of thousands of interacting swimmers to be simulated will also be developed, thus approaching biological realism.As a result of this study, an improved theoretical understanding of active suspensions will be achieved and will reveal the core biophysical mechanisms underlying nutrient transport and mixing in colonies of motile microorganisms. It may also shed light on the evolution of locomotory strategies, particularly for microorganisms that live and thrive cooperatively, as in biofilms. The broader impacts of this research lie in the importance of active suspensions to several key areas of science, including biology, human health and medicine, soft-condensed matter physics, and engineering. An understanding of active suspensions and what drives (or stops) their large-scale mixing could lead to new ways of controlling infection. It provides to physics a well-characterized example of nonequilibrium pattern formation arising in biology, and in engineering this understanding could lead to new devices that exploit biological materials for tasks such as mixing and pumping. This project's impact also lies in the development of new and important areas of inquiry for applied and computational mathematics, and in its adding to the theoretical and computational tool-kit that applied mathematicians and theoretical engineers can bring to problems in biological and complex fluid dynamics.

该奖项是根据2009年的《美国复苏与再投资法》（公法111-5）资助的。生物学上的悬架，其中游泳细菌浴是一个范式的例子，是其微观结构的流体系统。随着系统的“活跃颗粒”在周围的液体中推动自己推动自己，它们会产生干扰流，使他们的运动传达给其他游泳者，从而改变了他们的游泳方向和速度。这种相互的相互作用会导致相关，大规模和复杂的流体流，这些流动在长度和时间尺度上移动的流动远比任何单个游泳者大得多。这些游泳者驱动的流对微生物菌落的进化和存活具有重要意义，因为它们通过颗粒传输和流体混合影响营养递送，并且也可能在其他重要现象中发挥作用，例如Quorum Sensing和生物膜形成。它们也是非平衡模式形成系统的基本例子。在这个项目中，我们建议使用分析模型和数值模拟的组合进一步加深对生物活性悬浮液的理解。该研究将重点放在对这些系统中出现的相干结构以及与流体混合关系的建模和分析上。将检查边界和边界条件，限制和系统量表的影响。还将开发出新的多尺度方法，允许成千上万的相互作用的游泳者进行模拟，从而接近生物学现实主义。作为这项研究的结果，将提高对主动悬浮液的理论理解，并将揭示核心生物物理机制的核心生物物理机制，从而在营养和混合的Motile Microcromanismiss中营养和混合。它也可能阐明机车策略的演变，尤其是对于生物膜中生活和繁殖的微生物。这项研究的更广泛的影响在于对几个关键科学领域的主动悬挂的重要性，包括生物学，人类健康和医学，软粘附物理和工程。了解主动悬浮液以及其大规模混合的驱动器（或停止）可能导致控制感染的新方法。它为生物学中产生的非平衡模式形成的特征性示例提供了物理，并且在工程学中，这种理解可能会导致新设备利用生物学材料来进行混合和泵送等任务。该项目的影响还在于开发用于应用和计算数学的新重要领域，以及它加入了应用数学家和理论工程师的理论和计算工具套件，可以带来生物学和复杂流体动力学的问题。