Recent advances in blood rheology: A review

TL;DR

This review summarizes recent experimental, theoretical, and modeling advances in blood rheology, highlighting non-Newtonian behaviors, physiological influences, and multiscale approaches, with implications for cardiovascular disease diagnosis and treatment.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in blood rheology research, integrating experimental data, simulations, and models, and discusses cross-species variations.

Findings

Blood exhibits pseudoplasticity, viscoelasticity, and thixotropy.

Advances in experimental protocols improve understanding of physiological factors.

Multiscale modeling enhances insights into blood flow behavior.

Abstract

Due to the potential impact on the diagnosis and treatment of various cardiovascular diseases, work on the rheology of blood has significantly expanded in the last decade, both experimentally and theoretically. Experimentally, blood has been confirmed to demonstrate a variety of non-Newtonian rheological characteristics, including pseudoplasticity, viscoelasticity, and thixotropy. New rheological experiments and the development of more controlled experimental protocols on more extensive, broadly physiologically characterized, human blood samples demonstrate the sensitivity of aspects of hemorheology to several physiological factors. For example, at high shear rates to the red blood cells elastically deformation, imparting viscoelasticity, while and at low shear rates, they form rouleaux structures that impart additional, thixotropic behavior. In addition to these advances in experimental methods and validated data sets, significant advances have also been made in both microscopic simulations and macroscopic, continuum, modeling, as well as novel, multiscale approaches. We outline and evaluate the most promising of these recent advances. Although we primarily focus on human blood rheology, we also discuss recent observations on variations across some animal species that provide some indication on evolutionary effects.