Why antiplectic metachronal cilia waves are optimal to transport bronchial mucus.

The coordinated beating of epithelial cilia in human lungs is a fascinating problem from the hydrodynamics perspective. The phase lag between neighboring cilia is able to generate collective cilia motions, known as metachronal waves. Different kinds of waves can occur, antiplectic or symplectic, depending on the direction of the wave with respect to the flow direction. It is shown here, using a coupled lattice Boltzmann-immersed boundary solver, that the key mechanism responsible for their transport efficiency is a blowing-suction effect that displaces the interface between the periciliary liquid and the mucus phase. The contribution of this mechanism on the average flow generated by the cilia is compared to the contribution of the lubrication effect. The results reveal that the interface displacement is the main mechanism responsible for the better efficiency of antiplectic metachronal waves over symplectic ones to transport bronchial mucus. The conclusions drawn here can be extended to any two-layer fluid configuration having different viscosities, and put into motion by cilia-shaped or comb-plate structures, having a back-and-forth motion with phase lags.

Granular flows in a rotating drum: the scaling law between velocity and thickness of the flow.

The flow of dry granular material in a half-filled rotating drum is studied. The thickness of the flowing zone is measured for several rotation speeds, drum sizes and beads sizes (size ratio between drum and beads ranging from 47 to 7400). Varying the rotation speed, a scaling law linking mean velocity vs. thickness of the flow, v approximately h(m), is deduced for each couple (beads, drum). The obtained exponent m is not always equal to 1, the value previously reported for a drum in litterature, but varies with the geometry of the system. For small size ratios, exponents higher than 1 are obtained due to a saturation of the flowing zone thickness. The exponent of the power law decreases with the size ratio, leading to exponents lower than 1 for high size ratios. These exponents imply that the velocity gradient of a dry granular flow in a rotating drum is not constant. More fundamentally, these results show that the flow of a granular material in a rotating drum is very sensible to the geometry, and that the deduction of the "rheology" of a granular medium flowing in such a geometry is not obvious.