Parallel Simulation of Cellular Flow in Microvessels Using a Particle Method

Abstract

We developed a numerical method for large-scale simulations of cellular flow in microvessels. We employed a particle method, where all blood components were modeled using a finite number of particles. Red blood cell deformation was modeled by a spring network of membrane particles. A domain decomposition method was used for parallel implementation on distributed memory systems. In a strong scaling test up to 64 CPU cores, we obtained a linear speedup with the number of CPU cores, and demonstrated that our model can simulate O(103) red blood cells in vessels a few tens of micrometers in diameter. For quantitative validation, we analyzed the Fåhræus effect and the formation of a cell-depleted peripheral layer. Simulations were performed for tube hematocrit ranging from 20 to 45%, and microvessel diameters from 9 to 50 µm. Our numerical results were in good agreement with previous experimental results both for the discharge hematocrit and cell-depleted peripheral layer thickness.

Keywords

• large-scale simulation
• red blood cell
• microcirculation
• cell-depleted peripheral layer
• fåhræus effect