Simulations of Blood Flow in Plain Cylindrical and Constricted Vessels with Single Cell Resolution

TL;DR

This paper presents a new efficient simulation model for blood flow at the single-cell level in small vessels, capturing viscosity variations consistent with experimental data for hematocrit below 30%.

Contribution

The authors introduce a simple, highly efficient particulate model that bridges the gap between existing methods for simulating blood flow at the single-cell level.

Findings

Viscosity depends on vessel diameter for hematocrit below 30%.

Model accurately reproduces experimental viscosity data.

Applicable to vessels up to 100 micrometres in diameter.

Abstract

Understanding the physics of blood is challenging due to its nature as a suspension of soft particles and the fact that typical problems involve different scales. This is valid also for numerical investigations. In fact, many computational studies either neglect the existence of discrete cells or resolve relatively few cells very accurately. The authors recently developed a simple and highly efficient yet still particulate model with the aim to bridge the gap between currently applied methods. The present work focuses on its applicability to confined flows in vessels of diameters up to 100 micrometres. For hematocrit values below 30 percent, a dependence of the apparent viscosity on the vessel diameter in agreement with experimental literature data is found.