Analytical and numerical study of three main migration laws for vesicles under flow

Blood flow shows nontrivial spatiotemporal organization of the suspended entities under the action of a complex cross-streamline migration, that renders understanding of blood circulation and blood processing in lab-on-chip technologies a challenging issue. Cross-streamline migration has three main sources: (i) hydrodynamic lift force due to walls, (ii) gradients of the shear rate (as in Poiseuille flow), and (iii) hydrodynamic interactions among cells. We derive analytically these three laws of migration for a vesicle (a model for an erythrocyte) showing good agreement with numerical simulations and experiments. In an unbounded Poiseuille flow, the situation turns out to be quite complex. We predict that a vesicle may migrate either towards the center or away from it, or even show both behaviors for the same parameters, depending on initial position. This finding can both help understanding healthy and pathological erythrocyte behavior in blood circulation and be exploited in biotechnologies for cell sorting out.