The motion and deformation of a spherical elastic capsule freely flowing in a pore of comparable dimension is studied. The thin capsule membrane has a neo-Hookean shear softening constitutive law. The three-dimensional fluid–structure interactions are modelled by coupling a boundary integral method (for the internal and external fluid motion) with a finite element method (for the membrane deformation). In a cylindrical tube with a circular cross-section, the confinement effect of the channel walls leads to compression of the capsule in the hoop direction. The membrane then tends to buckle and to fold as observed experimentally. The capsule deformation is three-dimensional but can be fairly well approximated by an axisymmetric model that ignores the folds. In a microfluidic pore with a square cross-section, the capsule deformation is fully three-dimensional. For the same size ratio and flow rate, a capsule is more deformed in a circular than in a square cross-section pore. We provide new graphs of the deformation parameters and capsule velocity as a function of flow strength and size ratio in a square section pore. We show how these graphs can be used to analyse experimental data on the deformation of artificial capsules in such channels.

A microfluidic method is presented to measure the elastic membrane properties of a population of microcapsules with diameter of order 60 μm. The technique consists of flowing a suspension of capsules enclosed by a polymerized ovalbumin membrane through a square-section microfluidic channel with cross dimension comparable with the capsule mean diameter. The deformed profile and the velocity of a given capsule are recorded. A full mechanical model of the motion and deformation of an initially spherical capsule flowing inside a square-section channel is designed for different flow strengths, confinement ratios, and membrane constitutive laws. The experimental deformed profiles are analyzed with the numerical model. This allows us to find the ratio between the viscous and elastic forces and thus the shear elastic modulus of the membrane. We show that the ovalbumin membrane tends to have a strain-softening behavior under the conditions studied here.