Cellular Blood Flow in Small Vessels

Event Date/Time

Friday, March 11, 2016 - 15:30

Location

Andlinger Center
Maeder Hall

Series/Event Type

MAE Departmental Seminars

The cellular character of blood leads to complex flow phenomenology in vessels that are of comparable size to that of blood cells. We have designed and implemented an advanced algorithm that simultaneously solves for the dynamics of the highly deformable blood cells and their flow in such confined geometries. It is a boundary integral solver, with fast methods for evaluating the hydrodynamic interactions and spherical harmonics for representing cell shapes. The merits of this approach will be discussed from the perspective of the resolution of the discretization. The talk will include studies of three model configurations. (1) The transport of magnetic nanometer-scale particles in small vessels, which can be used for target drug or hyperthermia treatment. Stirring through interaction with the red blood cells lead these to marginate to vessel walls, but this is non-trivially coupled with applied magnetic forces. (2) A study of the flow of red-blood cell through a model spleenic slit, which seems to represent the smallest blood passages in the body. An instability-like bifurcation is identified that is potentially important physiologically and for engineered microdevices that process blood. Finally, (3) the transient and asymptotic stability of a single-file train of elastic capsules.

Speaker Bio

Jonathan Freund is the Kritzer Faculty Scholar of the Mechanical Science & Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he also serves jointly on the faculty of the Aerospace Engineering Department. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a winner of the 2008 Frenkiel Prize from its Division of Fluid Dynamics where he currently serves as the division secretary/treasurer. He is an associate editor of Physical Review Fluids and on the editorial board of Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. Computational science has been central to his research, which has included simulations of turbulent jet noise and its control, the dynamics of molecularly thin liquid films, nanostructure formation by ion-bombardment of semiconductor materials, and most recently the dynamics of red blood cells flowing in the narrow confines of the microcirculation. He co-directs the DOE-funded Center for Exascale Simulation of Plasma-Coupled Combustion at the University of Illinois.