Augmenting the Immersed Boundary Method with Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) for the Modeling of Platelets in Hemodynamic Flows

TL;DR

This paper introduces an enhanced immersed boundary method using Radial Basis Functions for more accurate and efficient modeling of platelets in blood flow simulations, outperforming traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel RBF-IB method that improves accuracy and stability in simulating platelet dynamics within hemodynamic flows.

Findings

RBF-IB shows better convergence and accuracy than traditional IB.

The new method allows larger stable time steps.

It reduces volume loss in simulations.

Abstract

We present a new computational method by extending the Immersed Boundary (IB) method with a spectrally-accurate geometric model based on Radial Basis Function (RBF) interpolation of the Lagrangian structures. Our specific motivation is the modeling of platelets in hemodynamic flows, though we anticipate that our method will be useful in other applications as well. The efficacy of our new RBF-IB method is shown through a series of numerical experiments. Specifically, we compare our method with the traditional IB method in terms of convergence and accuracy, computational cost, maximum stable time-step size and volume loss. We conclude that the RBF-IB method has advantages over the traditional Immersed Boundary method, and is well-suited for modeling of platelets in hemodynamic flows.