Cross-stream migration of a vesicle in vortical flows

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to explore how deformable vesicles behave in 2D vortical flows, revealing their migration patterns depend on viscosity ratios and flow forces, with implications for understanding biological cell dynamics.

Contribution

The paper provides new insights into vesicle migration in complex vortical flows, emphasizing the nonlinear effects of deformability and flow parameters in 2D simulations.

Findings

Deformable vesicles migrate towards the vortex center and rotate if sufficiently deformable.

Less deformable vesicles migrate away and cross vortex arrays.

Vesicle dynamics depend nonlinearly on viscosity ratio and shear forces.

Abstract

We use numerical simulations to systematically investigate the vesicle dynamics in two-dimensional (2D) Taylor-Green vortex flow in the absence of inertial forces. Vesicles are highly deformable membranes encapsulating an incompressible fluid and they serve as numerical and experimental proxies for biological cells such as red blood cells. Vesicle dynamics has been studied in free-space/bounded shear, Poiseuille and Taylor-Couette flows in 2D and 3D. Taylor-Green vortex are characterized with even more complicated properties than those flows such as non-uniform flow line curvature, shear gradient. We study the effects of two parameters on the vesicle dynamics: the ratio of the interior fluid viscosity to that of the exterior one and the ratio of the shear forces on the vesicle to the membrane stiffness (characterized by the capillary number). Vesicle deformability nonlinearly depends on these parameters. Although the study is in 2D, our findings contribute to the wide spectrum of intriguing vesicle dynamics: vesicles migrate inwards and eventually rotate at the vortex center if they are sufficiently deformable. If not so, they migrate away from the vortex center and travel across the periodic arrays of vortices.