Motivated by our desire to understand the biophysical mechanisms underlying the swimming of sperm in the non-Newtonian fluids of the female mammalian reproductive tract, we examine the swimming of filaments in the nonlinear viscoelastic upper convected Maxwell model. We obtain the swimming velocity and hydrodynamic force exerted on an infinitely long cylinder with prescribed beating pattern. We...

Liquid crystal flexoelectric actuation uses an imposed electric field to create membrane bending, and it is used by the outer hair cells (OHCs) located in the inner ear, whose role is to amplify sound through generation of mechanical power. Oscillations in the OHC membranes create periodic viscoelastic flows in the contacting fluid media. A key objective of this work on flexoelectric actuation ...

Liquid crystal flexoelectric actuation uses an imposed electric field to create membrane bending, and it is used by the outer hair cells (OHCs) located in the inner ear, whose role is to amplify sound through generation of mechanical power. Oscillations in the OHC membranes create periodic viscoelastic flows in the contacting fluid media. A key objective of this work on flexoelectric actuation ...

Adsorption of phospholipid vesicles on titanium dioxide was studied by a combination of quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D) and atomic force microscopy techniques. Vesicle size, concentration in solution, and bilayer composition were systematically varied. A strong dependence of the QCM-D response (magnitude of the frequency and dissipation factor shifts) on the vesicle concent...

The paper presents a Semi-Analytical Finite Element (SAFE) formulation coupled with a 2.5D Boundary Element Method (BEM) for the computation of the dispersion properties of viscoelastic waveguides with arbitrary cross-section and embedded in unbounded isotropic viscoelastic media. Attenuation of guided modes is described through the imaginary component of the axial wavenumber, which accounts fo...