We consider a rotor made of two camphor disks glued below the ends of a plastic stripe. The disks are floating on a water surface and the plastic stripe does not touch the surface. The system can rotate around a vertical axis located at the center of the stripe. The disks dissipate camphor molecules. The driving momentum comes from the nonuniformity of surface tension resulting from inhomogeneous surface concentration of camphor molecules around the disks. We investigate the stationary angular velocity as a function of rotor radius ℓ. For large ℓ the angular velocity decreases for increasing ℓ. At a specific value of ℓ the angular velocity reaches its maximum and, for short ℓ it rapidly decreases. Such behaviour is confirmed by a simple numerical model. The model also predicts that there is a critical rotor size below which it does not rotate. Within the introduced model we analyze the type of this bifurcation.
We studied rotation of a disk propelled by a number of camphor pills symmetrically distributed at its edge. The disk was put on a water surface so that it could rotate around a vertical axis located at the disk center. In such a system, the driving torque originates from surface tension difference resulting from inhomogeneous surface concentration of camphor molecules released from the pills. Here, we investigated the dependence of the stationary angular velocity on the disk radius and on the number of pills. The work extends our previous study on a linear rotor propelled by two camphor pills [Y. Koyano et al., Phys. Rev. E 96, 012609 (2017)]. It was observed that the angular velocity dropped to zero after a critical number of pills was exceeded. Such behavior was confirmed by a numerical model of time evolution of the rotor. The model predicts that, for a fixed friction coefficient, the speed of pills can be accurately represented by a function of the linear number density of pills. We also present bifurcation analysis of the conditions at which the transition between a standing and a rotating disk appears.
We study the motion of a camphor disk on the water surface in a system with flexible boundaries.The boundaries can be dynamically modified by non-uniform surface tension resulting from the nonhomogeneous surface concentration of the camphor molecules dissipated by the disk. We investigate the geometry of the boundaries that forces unidirectional motion of the disk. The studied system can be regarded as a signal diode if the presence or absence of a camphor disk at a specific point is interpreted as the binary TRUE and FALSE variables. The diode can be incorporated into more complex devices, like a ring that imposes unidirectional rotation of camphor disks.
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