On the Numerical Simulation of Red Blood Cell Motions in Micro-Channels

Abstract

In this presentation we consider a spring model and an immersed boundary method to simulate the skeleton structure of a red blood cell membrane and to investigate the rheology of these red blood cells in Poiseuille flows. The simulation results show that the rate of migration toward the center of the channel depends upon the area reduction and the deformability of the cells. We have also combined the above methodology with a fictitious domain method to study the motion of red blood cells in a micro-channel with a constriction, which can enhance the cell-free layer adjacent to the boundary.

About the speaker

Prof. Roland Glowinski is a professor of mathematics and mechanical engineering at the University of Houston. He has been awarded the Seymour Cray Prize in France in 1988, the Grand Prix Marcel Dassault of the French National Academy of Sciences in 1996, and the SIAM Von Kármán Prize in 2004.

Prof. Glowinski is an honorary doctor of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, an honorary professor of Fudan University in Shanghai, a SIAM Fellow and a member of the French National Academy of Sciences, the French National Academy of Technology and the Academia Europaea. His scientific interests include computational fluid dynamics, non-smooth mechanics, the control of distributed parameter systems, large scale optimization and the computational aspects of the calculus of variations, and more recently, computational methods for fully nonlinear elliptic equations such as Monge-Ampère’s, Pucci's etc.