By Kun-Ta Wu, Ph.D.
Pumping water through a pipe solves the need to provide water in every house. By turning on faucets, we retrieve water at home without needing to carry it from a reservoir with buckets. However, driving water through a pipe requires external pressure; such pressure increases linearly with pipe length. Longer pipes need to be more rigid for sustaining proportionally-increased pressure, preventing pipes from exploding. Hence, transporting fluids through pipes has been a challenging problem for physics as well as engineering communities.
To overcome such a problem, Postdoctoral Associate Kun-Ta Wu and colleagues from the Dogic and Fraden labs, and Brandeis MRSEC doped water with 0.1% v/v active matter. The active matter mainly consisted of kinesin-driven microtubules. These microtubules were extracted from cow brain tissues. In cells, microtubules play an important role in cell activity, such as cell division and nutrient transport. The activity originates from kinesin molecular motors walking along microtubules. In cargo transport, microtubules are like rail tracks; kinesin motors are like trains. When these tracks and trains are doped in water, their motion drives surrounding fluids, generating vortices. The vortices only circulate locally; there is no global net flow.
Figure: Increasing the height of the annulus induces a transition from locally turbulent to globally coherent flows of a confined active isotropic fluid. The left and right half-plane of each annulus illustrate the instantaneous and time-averaged flow and vorticity map of the self-organized flows. The transition to coherent flows is an intrinsically 3D phenomenon that is controlled by the aspect ratio of the channel cross section and vanishes for channels that are either too shallow or too thin. Adapted from Wu et al. Science 355, eaal1979 (2017).
