Journal
JOURNAL OF BIOMECHANICS
Volume 46, Issue 11, Pages 1810-1817Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jbiomech.2013.05.010
Keywords
Red blood cells; Aggregation; Adhesion; Immersed boundary method; Numerical simulation
Categories
Funding
- Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship [PIIF-GA-2009-253453]
- Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [51021004]
- EPSRC Turbulence consortium [EP/G069581/1]
- EPSRC [EP/G069581/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/G069581/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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Aggregation of highly deformable red blood cells (RBCs) significantly affects the blood flow in the human circulatory system. To investigate the effect of deformation and aggregation of RBCs in blood flow, a mathematical model has been established by coupling the interaction between the fluid and the deformable solids. The model includes a three-dimensional finite volume method solver for incompressible viscous flows, the combined finite-discrete element method for computing the deformation of the RBCs, a JKR model-Johnson, Kendall and Roberts (1964-1971) (Johnson et al., 1971) to take account of the adhesion forces between different RBCs and an iterative direct-forcing immersed boundary method to couple the fluid-solid interactions. The flow of 49,512 RBCs at 45% concentration under the influence of aggregating forces was examined, improving the existing knowledge on simulating flow and structural characteristics of blood at a large scale: previous studies on the particular issue were restricted to simulating the flow of 13,000 aggregative ellipsoidal particles at a 10% concentration. The results are in excellent agreement with experimental studies. More specifically, both the experimental and the simulation results show uniform RBC distributions under high shear rates (60-100/s) whereas large aggregation structures were observed under a lower shear rate of 10/s. The statistical analysis of the simulation data also shows that the shear rate has significant influence on both the flow velocity profiles and the frequency distribution of the RBC orientation angles. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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