Contemporary modeling and analysis of steady state and transient human blood rheology

Abstract

The rheological characterization of a human blood, through modeling and analysis of transient flows and large-amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) flow, has made tremendous progress recently. We show how various components, and modifications of two recent scalar, structural kinetic, thixotropic models, can offer several modeling and prediction improvements, and compare our results to the Maxwell-like Bautista-Manero-Puig (BMP) model, and a recent transient model based on the Herschel-Bulkley. We explore the weakness of the legacy blood models, and then, we apply this newly improved model to recently published data from the literature in order to demonstrate its efficacy in modeling steady state, transient, and oscillatory shear flow. Following this effort, we demonstrate a novel approach using the sequence of physical phenomena (SPP) to facilitate interpretation, characterization, mapping, and “fingerprinting” of transient blood data from the literature. We compare the SPP approach to other LAOS analysis techniques in the literature and show how our approach can function as a mechanical-property diagnostic blood analysis tool. The goal of this work is a deeper understanding of the microstructural basis and validity of structural thixotropic blood models, and transient flow analysis techniques and procedures.