Three-dimensional simulation of elastic capsules in shear flow by the penalty immersed boundary method

An improved penalty immersed boundary method (pIBM) has been proposed for simulation of flow-induced deformation of three-dimensional (3D) elastic capsules. The motion of the capsule membrane is described in the Lagrangian coordinates. The membrane deformation takes account of the bending and twisting effects as well as the stretching and shearing effects. The method of subdivision surfaces is adopted to generate the mesh of membrane and the corresponding shape functions, which are required to be C-1 continuous. The membrane motion is then solved by the subdivision-surface based finite element method on the triangular unstructured mesh. On the other hand, the fluid motion is defined on the Eulerian domain, and is advanced by the fractional step method on a staggered Cartesian grid. Coupling of the fluid motion and the membrane motion is realized in the framework of the pIBM. Using the proposed method, deformation of 3D elastic capsules in a linear shear flow is studied in detail, and validations are examined by comparing with previous studies. Both the neo-Hookean membrane and the Skalak membrane are tested. For an initially spherical capsule the tank-treading motion is formed under various dimensionless shear rates and reduced bending moduli. It is found that buckling occurs near the equator of the capsule for small shear rates but near the tips for large shear rates, which is suppressed by including the bending rigidity of the membrane. Effects of the Reynolds number and the membrane density are investigated for an initially spherical capsule. For a non-spherical capsule, with the initial shape of the oblate spheroid or the biconcave circular disk as a model of the red blood cell, the swinging motion is observed due to the shape memory effect By decreasing the dimensionless shear rate or increasing the reduced bending modulus, the swinging motion is transited into the tumbling motion. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.