Many of the intriguing properties of blood originate from its cellular nature. Therefore, accurate modeling of blood flow related phenomena requires a description of the dynamics at the level of individual cells. This, however, presents several computational challenges that can only be addressed by high performance computing. We present Hemocell, a parallel computing framework which implements validated mechanical models for red blood cells and is capable of reproducing the emergent transport characteristics of such a complex cellular system. It is computationally capable of handling large domain sizes, thus it is able to bridge the cell-based micro-scale and macroscopic domains. We introduce a new material model for resolving the mechanical responses of red blood cell membranes under various flow conditions and compare it with a well established model. Our new constitutive model has similar accuracy under relaxed flow conditions, however, it performs better for shear rates over 1,500 s−1. We also introduce a new method to generate randomized initial conditions for dense mixtures of different cell types free of initial positioning artifacts.

No abstract

No abstract

In-silico cellular models of blood are invaluable to gain understanding about the many interesting properties that blood exhibits. However, numerical investigations that focus on the effects of cytoplasmic viscosity in these models are not very prevalent. We present a parallelised method to implement cytoplasmic viscosity for HemoCell, an open-source cellular model based on immersed boundary lattice Boltzmann methods, using an efficient ray-casting algorithm. The effects of the implementation are investigated with single-cell simulations focusing on the deformation in shear flow, the migration due to wall induced lift forces, the characteristic response time in periodic stretching and pair collisions between red blood cells and platelets. Collective transport phenomena are also investigated in many-cell simulations in a pressure driven channel flow. The simulations indicate that the addition of a viscosity contrast between internal and external fluids significantly affects the deformability of a red blood cell, which is most pronounced during very short time-scale events. Therefore, modelling the cytoplasmic viscosity contrast is important in scenarios with high velocity deformation, typically high shear rate flows.