Effect of deformability difference between two erythrocytes on their aggregation

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the rheology of a doublet that is an aggregate of two red blood cells (RBCs). According to previous studies, most aggregates in blood flow consist of RBC doublet-pairs and thus the understanding of doublet dynamics has scientific importance in describing its hemodynamics. The RBC aggregation tendency can be significantly affected by the cell’s deformability which can vary in both physiological and pathological conditions. Hence, we conducted two-dimensional simulation of doublet dynamics in a simple shear flow condition with different deformability between RBCs. To study the dissociation process of the doublet, we employed the aggregation model described by the Morse type potential function, which is based on the depletion theory. In addition, we developed a new method of updating fluid property to consider viscosity difference between RBC cytoplasm and plasma. Our results showed that deformability difference between the two RBCs could significantly reduce their aggregating tendency in a shear condition of 50 s−1, resulting in disaggregation. Since even in physiological conditions, the cell deformability may be significantly different, consideration of the difference in deformability amongst RBCs in blood flow would be needed for the hemodynamic studies based on numerical approach.

Effect of spectrin network elasticity on the shapes of erythrocyte doublets

“…These shapes are also qualitatively consistent with those obtained in several two-dimensional (2D) investigations. [22][23][24] In recent work, 25 various RBC doublet phases have been explored depending on the dextran and fibrinogen concentration, which modifies the attractive interaction between RBCs. The experimental data have been mainly supported by two-dimensional (2D) simulations, 25 and therefore, it remains unclear whether the whole phase space of the system has been explored or not and whether some other RBC doublet phases exist in practice.…”

Advances in Computational Fluid Mechanics in Cellular Flow Manipulation: A Review

“…A few examples of how LBM method performed in the real applications are presented in the following. Deformability of RBCs has been studied using LBM in simple channel conditions [60,61] and/or under more complex environments [62,63]. A few examples of results obtained from simulations using LBM method to simulate phenomena related to RBCs are presented in Figure 4.…”

Numerical investigation on red blood cell dynamics in microflow: Effect of cell deformability

“…Thus, an index field has been introduced to identify the relative position of a fluid node to the cell membrane [8,21,35,36]. We have recently developed a new method (Flood-fill method) to consider the different viscosity of the interior fluid [14]. This method assigns an index value of 0.0 to the interior domain and 1.0 to the exterior domain to separate the two domains in the index field.…”

“…In this study, by using the immersed boundary -lattice Boltzmann method (IB-LBM), we investigated the radial motion of individual RBCs over a range of PSR (25-100 s -1 ) found in arteriolar flows [16]. The IB-LBM has been utilized to describe the single RBC dynamics [3,14,[32][33][34]37] as well as multiple RBCs dynamics in simple shear flow [2,38] while there are also many hemodynamics simulations [1,31] performed without using it. In the present study, multiple RBCs flows have been simulated in the two-dimensional (2-D) domain.…”