In-Flow dynamics of an area-difference-energy spring-particle red blood cell model on non-uniform grids

Abstract

In this paper the area-difference-energy spring-particle (ADE-SP) red blood cell (RBC) structural model developed by Chen and Boyle is coupled with a lattice Boltzmann flux solver to simulate RBC dynamics. The novel ADE-SP model accounts for bending resistance due to the membrane area difference of RBCs while the lattice Boltzmann flux solver offers reduced computational runtimes through GPU parallelisation and enabling the employment of non-uniform meshes. This coupled model is used to simulate RBC dynamics and predictions are compared with existing experimental measurements. The simulations successfully predict tumbling, tank-treading, swinging and intermittent behaviour of an RBC in shear flow, and demonstrate the capability of the model in capturing in-flow RBC behaviours.

Keywords:

• Red Blood Cell Dynamics
• Lattice Boltzmann Flux Solver
• Tank Treading
• GPU
• spring-particle

Acknowledgements and source code

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Technological University Dublin Fiosraigh Scholarship programme which funded this research, the support of NVIDIA Corporation for the donation of the Tesla K40 GPU used in this research and also ICHEC for access to the Irish supercomputer Kay. The source code that was developed during this research can be found at https://github.com/CHRG-Developer/3D-PLFBS-GPU.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.