Numerical Simulations of Red-Blood Cells in Fluid Flow: A Discrete Multiphysics Study

Abstract

In this paper, we present a methodological study of modelling red blood cells (RBCs) in shear-induced flows based on the discrete multiphysics (DMP) approach. The DMP is an alternative approach from traditional multiphysics based on meshless particle-based methods. The proposed technique has been successful in modelling multiphysics and multi-phase problems with large interfacial deformations such as those in biological systems. In this study, we present the proposed method and introduce an accurate geometrical representation of the RBC. The results were validated against available data in the literature. We further illustrate that the proposed method is capable of modelling the rupture of the RBC membrane with minimum computational difficulty.

Keywords

• discrete multiphysics
• the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method
• fluid–solid interactions (FSI)
• red-blood cells
• numerical modelling
• shear flow