Redox flow batteries (RFBs) are propitious stationary energy storage technologies with exceptional scalability and flexibility to improve the stability, efficiency, and sustainability of our power grid. The redox-active materials are the key component for RFBs with which to achieve high energy density and good cyclability. Traditional inorganic-based materials encounter critical technical and economic limitations such as low solubility, inferior electrochemical activity, and high cost. Redox-active organic materials (ROMs) are promising alternative "green" candidates to push the boundaries of energy storage because of the significant advantages of molecular diversity, structural tailorability, and natural abundance. Here, the recent development of a variety of ROMs and associated battery designs in both aqueous and nonaqueous electrolytes are reviewed. The critical challenges and potential research opportunities for developing practically relevant organic flow batteries are discussed.

The viscosity of blood has long been used as an indicator in the understanding and treatment of disease, and the advent of modern viscometers allows its measurement with ever-improving clinical convenience. However, these advances have not been matched by theoretical developments that can yield a quantitative understanding of blood's microrheology and its possible connection to relevant biomolecules (e.g., fibrinogen). Using coarse-grained molecular dynamics and two different red blood cell models, we accurately predict the dependence of blood viscosity on shear rate and hematocrit. We explicitly represent cell-cell interactions and identify the types and sizes of reversible rouleaux structures that yield a tremendous increase of blood viscosity at low shear rates. We also present the first quantitative estimates of the magnitude of adhesive forces between red cells. In addition, our simulations support the hypothesis, previously deduced from experiments, of yield stress as an indicator of cell aggregation. This non-Newtonian behavior is analyzed and related to the suspension's microstructure, deformation, and dynamics of single red blood cells. The most complex cell dynamics occurs in the intermediate shear rate regime, where individual cells experience severe deformation and transient folded conformations. The generality of these cell models together with single-cell measurements points to the future prediction of blood-viscosity anomalies and the corresponding microstructures associated with various diseases (e.g., malaria, AIDS, and diabetes mellitus). The models can easily be adapted to tune the properties of a much wider class of complex fluids including capsule and vesicle suspensions.blood rheology | blood modeling | shear thinning | aggregation force | dissipative particle dynamics R heological and material properties of cell, capsule, and vesicle suspensions have many applications in medicine, biology, engineering, and materials science. One of the main examples of such suspensions is blood, which consists of RBCs, predominant by volume, and a small fraction of other cells and proteins suspended in the plasma. Understanding blood flow and its relation to cellular properties and interactions may lead to advances in biomedical applications (e.g., drug delivery, blood substitutes). Moreover, a change in blood rheological and flow properties is often associated with hematological diseases or disorders (e.g., sickle-cell anemia, malaria), and therefore the viscosity of blood has long been used as an indicator in the understanding and treatment of disease.Modern rheometry techniques and instruments yield reliable measurements of macroscopic properties of cell suspensions with ever-improving convenience-for example, the bulk properties of blood measured in various laboratories (1-6). Virtually all bloodviscosity measurements are necessarily in vitro, and before newly drawn blood is introduced into a viscometer it must at least be stabilized with an anticoagulant, which is then called "whole blood." Under flow...

We demonstrate that suspended spherical colloidal particles can be effectively modeled as single dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) particles provided that the conservative repulsive force is appropriately chosen. The suspension model is further improved with a new formulation, which augments standard DPD with noncentral dissipative shear forces between particles while preserving angular momentum. Using the new DPD formulation we investigate the rheology, microstructure and shear-induced migration of a monodisperse suspension of colloidal particles in plane shear flows (Couette and Poiseuille). Specifically, to achieve a well-dispersed suspension we employ exponential conservative forces for the colloid-colloid and colloid-solvent interactions but keep the conventional linear force for the solvent-solvent interactions. Our simulations yield relative viscosity versus volume fraction predictions in good agreement with both experimental data and empirical correlations. We also compute the shear-dependent viscosity and the first and second normal-stress differences and coefficients in both Couette and Poiseuille flow. Simulations near the close packingvolume-fraction (64%) at low shear rates demonstrate a transition to flow-induced string-like structures of colloidal particles simultaneously with a transition to a nonlinear Couette velocity profile in agreement with experimental observations. After a sufficient increase ofthe shear rate the ordered structure melts into disorder with restoration of the linear velocity profile. Migration effects simulated in Poiseuille flow compare well with experiments and model predictions. The important role of angular momentum and torque in nondilute suspensions is also demonstrated when compared with simulations by the standard DPD, which omits the angular degrees of freedom. Overall, the new method agrees very well with the Stokesian Dynamics method but it seems to have lower computational complexity and is applicable to general complex fluids systems.

The combination of short-range repulsive and long-range attractive forces in many-body dissipative particle dynamics (MDPD) is examined at a vapor/liquid and liquid/solid interface. Based on the radial distribution of the virial pressure in a drop at equilibrium, a systematic study is carried out to characterize the sensitivity of the surface tension coefficient with respect to the inter-particle interaction parameters. For the first time, the approximately cubic dependence of the surface tension coefficient on the bulk density of the fluid is evidenced. In capillary flow, MDPD solutions are shown to satisfy the condition on the wavelength of an axial disturbance leading to the pinch-off of a cylindrical liquid thread; correctly, no pinch-off occurs below the cutoff wavelength. Moreover, in an example that illustrates the cascade of fluid dynamics behaviors from potential to inertial-viscous to stochastic flow, the dynamics of the jet radius is consistent with the power law predictions of asymptotic analysis. To model interaction with a solid wall, MDPD is augmented by a set of bell-shaped weight functions; hydrophilic and hydrophobic behaviors, including the occurrence of slip in the latter, are reproduced using a modification in the weight function that avoids particle clustering. The dynamics of droplets entering an inverted Y-shaped fracture junction is shown to be correctly captured in simulations parametrized by the Bond number, confirming the flexibility of MDPD in modeling interface-dominated flows.

We present data-driven coarse-grained (CG) modeling for polymers in solution, which conserves the dynamic as well as structural properties of the underlying atomistic system. The CG modeling is built upon...

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is aLagrangian method based on a meshless discretization of partial differential equations. In this review, we present SPH discretization of the Navier-Stokes and advection-diffusionreaction equations, implementation of various boundary conditions, and time integration of the SPH equations, and we discuss applications of the SPH method for modeling pore-scale multiphase flows and reactive transport in porous and fractured media.

The red blood cell (RBC) is an important determinant of the rheological properties of blood because of its predominant number density, special mechanical properties and dynamics. Here, we develop a new low-dimensional RBC model based on dissipative particle dynamics (DPD). The model is constructed as a closed-torus-like ring of 10 colloidal particles connected by wormlike chain springs combined with bending resistance. Each colloidal particle is represented by a single DPD particle with a repulsive core. The model is able to capture the essential mechanical properties of RBCs, and allows for economical exploration of the rheology of RBC suspensions. Specifically, we find that the linear and non-linear elastic deformations of healthy and malaria-infected cells match those obtained in optical tweezers experiments. Through simulations of some key features of blood flow in vessels, i.e., the cell-free layer (CFL), the Fahraeus effect and the Fahraeus-Lindqvist effect, we verify that the new model captures the essential shear flow properties of real blood, except for capillaries of sizes comparable to the cell diameter. Finally, we investigate the influence of a geometrical constriction in the flow on the enhancement of the downstream CFL. Our results are in agreement with recent experiments.

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