Enhancing Transport Barriers with Swimming Microorganisms in Chaotic Flows

Abstract: We investigate the effects of bacterial activity on the mixing and transport properties of a passive scalar in time-periodic flows in experiments and in a simple model. We focus on the interactions between swimming E. coli and the Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCSs) of the flow, which are computed from experimentally measured velocity fields. Experiments show that such interactions are non-trivial and can lead to transport barriers through which the scalar flux is significantly reduced. Using the Poincar\'e map, we show that these transport barriers coincide with the outermost members of elliptic LCSs known as Lagrangian vortex boundaries. Numerical simulations further show that elliptic LCSs can repel elongated swimmers and lead to swimmer depletion within Lagrangian coherent vortices. A simple mechanism shows that such depletion is due to the preferential alignment of elongated swimmers with the tangents of elliptic LCSs. Our results provide insights into understanding the transport of microorganisms in complex flows with dynamical topological features from a Lagrangian viewpoint.