Efficient Numerical Simulation of Biochemotaxis Phenomena in Fluid Environments

Abstract

A novel dimension splitting method is proposed for the efficient numerical simulation of a biochemotaxis model, which is a coupled system of chemotaxis–fluid equations and incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. A second-order pressure correction method is employed to decouple the velocity and pressure for the Navier–Stokes equations. Then, the alternating direction implicit scheme is used to solve the velocity equation, and the operator with dimension splitting effect is used instead of the traditional elliptic operator to solve the pressure equation. For the chemotactic equation, the operator splitting method and extrapolation technique are used to solve oxygen and cell density to achieve second-order time accuracy. The proposed dimension splitting method splits the two-dimensional problem into a one-dimensional problem by splitting the spatial derivative, which reduces the computation and storage costs. Finally, through interesting experiments, we show the evolution of the cell plume shape during the descent process. The effect of changing specific parameters on the velocity and plume shape during the descent process is also studied.

Keywords

• biochemotaxis
• dimension splitting method
• finite difference method