Numerical Micro-Bio-Fluidics (NMBF)

About the group

The Numerical Micro-Bio-Fluidics group was created in 2020 as the collaborative work of researchers from the Universidade de São Paulo (São Carlos - Brazil) and the Universidad del Valle (Cali - Colombia) together with the contribution of students from the mentioned institutions. As a research group, we are interested in the numerical simulation of microswimmers using FEM-based codes.

Acted upon by internal or external forces, microscopic bodies can move so as to swim in a highly viscous ambient fluid. The configurations of this microswimmer become unknowns of the corresponding fluid-solid interaction problem, coupled to the equations that describe the fluid's dynamics. We study finite element methods capable of dealing with this swimming scenario, as well as the variational formulation and suitable function spaces, so as to apply this formulation to numerically compute the movement of swimmers in low-Reynolds regimes.

We use the fluid-solid interaction solver to feed (deep) reinforcement learning algorithms aiming the simulation the swimming learning process of a microswimmer.