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Updated: Apr 6, 2026

Endothelialized Microfluidics for Studying Microvascular Interactions in Hematologic Diseases
Published on: June 22, 2012
Study of blood flow in several benchmark micro-channels using a two-fluid approach
Wei-Tao Wu1, Fang Yang2, James F Antaki2
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA.
Abstract:
It is known that in a vessel whose characteristic dimension (e.g., its diameter) is in the range of 20 to 500 microns, blood behaves as a non-Newtonian fluid, exhibiting complex phenomena, such as shear-thinning, stress relaxation, and also multi-component behaviors, such as the Fahraeus effect, plasma-skimming, etc. For describing these non-Newtonian and multi-component characteristics of blood, using the framework of mixture theory, a two-fluid model is applied, where the plasma is treated as a Newtonian fluid and the red blood cells (RBCs) are treated as shear-thinning fluid. A computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation incorporating the constitutive model was implemented using OpenFOAM® in which benchmark problems including a sudden expansion and various driven slots and crevices were studied numerically. The numerical results exhibited good agreement with the experimental observations with respect to both the velocity field and the volume fraction distribution of RBCs.
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