Numerical modeling of the behavior of an elastic capsule in a microchannel flow: The initial motion

The initial motion of two-dimensional capsule in microchannel flow just after release is investigated in this paper by a numerical simulation method, which combines the finite volume method with the front tracking technique. The capsule is modeled as liquid medium enclosed by a thin membrane, for which linear elastic properties are taken into consideration. Three kinds of initial capsule shapes (circle, ellipse, and biconcave) and three initial positions (center-line, near-center, and near-wall positions) are considered in the simulations. Off-center capsules (the near-center and near-wall capsules) experience tilting and membrane tank-treading, and migrate laterally while they move with the fluid flow. After initial rapid tilting, the circular and elliptic near-wall capsules reach quasistationary tilt orientation, while the biconcave near-wall capsules experience steady change in tilt orientation with time. Lateral movements of the capsules indicate the existence of lift effect causing the capsule to move away from the wall. Lift velocities, the velocity components along the transverse direction, of the circular near-wall capsules decrease as they approach the centerline, while those of the elliptic and biconcave near-wall capsules do not show this trend, which might result from the short range of the simulation time. In general, the capsule with higher membrane dilation modulus has lower lift velocity, showing the effect of capsule deformability on the capsule behavior. Both tank-treading and lift velocities are 1-2 orders lower than the capsule translational velocity. For the circular and biconcave capsules, no matter the center-line or off-center capsules, hematocrit ratio increases with the membrane dilation modulus, namely, the capsule moving velocity decreases with the increasing dilation modulus, while the elliptic capsules with nondimensional membrane dilation moduli of 2500 and 500 show inverse trend in some time range. A preliminary study is carried out for long-term simulation of a circular capsule.