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Updated: Aug 24, 2025
10:27
Controlled Microfluidic Environment for Dynamic Investigation of Red Blood Cell Aggregation
Published on: June 4, 2015
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A cell-resolved, Lagrangian solver for modeling red blood cell dynamics in macroscale flows
Grant Rydquist1, Mahdi Esmaily1
1Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States.
Journal of Computational Physics
|October 24, 2022
Summary
This study introduces a computational framework to simulate red blood cell (RBC) rupture in medical devices. The method accurately models RBC stress and deformation in complex flows, overcoming computational limitations.
Area of Science:
- Biomedical Engineering
- Computational Fluid Dynamics
- Cellular Mechanics
Background:
- Red blood cells (RBCs) can rupture (hemolysis) under high stress in medical devices.
- Directly simulating RBCs in macroscale devices is computationally prohibitive due to scale differences.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop an affordable computational framework for simulating RBC stress and deformation in macroscale flow fields.
- To accurately predict RBC behavior in medical devices by overcoming scale separation challenges.
Main Methods:
- Treating RBCs as one-way coupled tracers in a macroscale flow.
- Employing a boundary integral method coupled with a structural solver.
- Discretizing governing equations using spherical harmonics for spectral accuracy.
Main Results:
- The framework accurately resolves RBC stress and deformation in spatially and temporally varying flows.
- Predictions show good agreement with simulations of spherical capsules and optical tweezers experiments.
- Computational cost scales with p^5, with fast convergence for p ⪅ 20.
Conclusions:
- The developed framework offers an accurate and computationally feasible approach to study RBC dynamics in medical devices.
- This method enables better understanding and prediction of hemolysis in clinical applications.
- The approach effectively bridges the gap between cellular and device-level scales.
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