Numerical Simulation of Aggregation and Deformation of Red Blood Cells in Microchannels With Different Stenosis Severities

Abstract

Abstract Numerical simulation of cellular blood flow modeling has attracted many studies in the few recent years due to its importance in determining many macroscopic properties of blood. Additionally, the accurate modeling of blood flow, and hence the diagnosing of many cardiovascular diseases requires a detailed description of the dynamical behavior of individual cells. The aim of this study is to simulate the blood flow in the cellular level to have a better understanding and accurate modeling of blood flow in some cases that are not intensively examined in literature such as the dense suspension of flowing RBCs in microvessel with different degrees of stenosis. The present study is based on an open-source code, Hemocell for modeling blood flow in the cellular level. The lattice Boltzmann method coupled with the immersed boundary method are used to capture the cell deformation and the interaction between plasma forces and cell membrane. The distributions of the RBCs in both radial and axial directions are obtained. The deformation of the cells due to passing through the vessel especially the throat is studied for two cases of stenosis. It is found that the deformation of the cells at the center of the stenosis is higher than the deformation in other regions. Additionally, the increase of the stenosis degree increases the average deformation of the cells. It is observed that a longer time is required for the simulation in the case of 80 % reduction in the diameter.