Understanding the dynamics of circulating tumor cell (CTC) behavior within the vasculature has remained an elusive goal in cancer biology. To elucidate the contribution of hydrodynamics in determining sites of CTC vascular colonization, the physical forces affecting these cells must be evaluated in a highly controlled manner. To this end, we have bioprinted endothelialized vascular beds and perfused these constructs with metastatic mammary gland cells under physiological flow rates. By pairing these in vitro devices with an advanced computational flow model, we found that the bioprinted analog was readily capable of evaluating the accuracy and integrated complexity of a computational flow model, while also highlighting the discrete contribution of hydrodynamics in vascular colonization. This intersection of these two technologies, bioprinting and computational simulation, is a key demonstration in the establishment of an experimentation pipeline for the understanding of complex biophysical events.
We extend a recently proposed ternary free energy lattice Boltzmann model with high density contrast [1], by incorporating wetting boundaries at solid walls. The approaches are based on forcing and geometric schemes, with implementations optimised for ternary (and more generally higher order multicomponent) models. Advantages and disadvantages of each method are addressed by performing both static and dynamic tests, including the capillary filling dynamics of a liquid displacing the gas phase, and the self-propelled motion of a train of drops. Furthermore, we measure dynamic angles and show that the slip length critically depends on the equilibrium value of the contact angles, and whether it belongs to liquid-liquid or liquid-gas interfaces. These results validate the model capabilities of simulating complex ternary fluid dynamic problems near solid boundaries, for example drop impact solid substrates covered by a lubricant layer.
In this work, we propose a numerical framework to simulate fluid flows in interaction with moving porous media of complex geometry. It is based on the Lattice Boltzmann method including porous effects via a Brinkman-Forchheimer-Darcy force model coupled to the Immersed Boundary method to handle complex geometries and moving structures. The coupling algorithm is described in detail and it is validated on well-established literature test cases for both stationary and moving porous configurations. The proposed method is easy to implement and efficient in terms of CPU cost and memory management compared to alternative methods which can be used to deal with moving immersed porous media, e.g. re-meshing at each time step or use of a moving/chimera mesh. An overall good agreement was obtained with reference results, opening the way to the numerical simulation of moving porous media for flow control applications.
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