A simplified particulate model for coarse-grained hemodynamics simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simplified, scalable particulate model for simulating coarse-grained blood flow, combining lattice Boltzmann methods and anisotropic potentials to capture key hemorheological behaviors efficiently.

Contribution

The authors develop a minimalist particulate blood flow model that balances simplicity and accuracy, enabling simulations at relevant scales for microvascular conditions.

Findings

Model effectively captures hemorheological properties.

Scalable implementation suitable for large-scale simulations.

Applicable to microvasculature flow conditions.

Abstract

Human blood flow is a multi-scale problem: in first approximation, blood is a dense suspension of plasma and deformable red cells. Physiological vessel diameters range from about one to thousands of cell radii. Current computational models either involve a homogeneous fluid and cannot track particulate effects or describe a relatively small number of cells with high resolution, but are incapable to reach relevant time and length scales. Our approach is to simplify much further than existing particulate models. We combine well established methods from other areas of physics in order to find the essential ingredients for a minimalist description that still recovers hemorheology. These ingredients are a lattice Boltzmann method describing rigid particle suspensions to account for hydrodynamic long range interactions and---in order to describe the more complex short-range behavior of cells---anisotropic model potentials known from molecular dynamics simulations. Paying detailedness, we achieve an efficient and scalable implementation which is crucial for our ultimate goal: establishing a link between the collective behavior of millions of cells and the macroscopic properties of blood in realistic flow situations. In this paper we present our model and demonstrate its applicability to conditions typical for the microvasculature.