Simulation of Lateral Migration of Red Blood Cell in Poiseuille Flow Using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Abstract

Cell separation is a process of isolating one or more specific cell populations from a heterogeneous mixture of cells. Understanding the dynamics of cells in different flow conditions is necessary to develop and improve the cell separation methods based on mechanical properties of cells. The present work numerically investigates the lateral migration of a deformable red blood cell in Poiseuille flow and the effect of the initial position of the cell on migration time and final shape of RBC. A meshless particle-based method known as smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is used in the simulations, which has several advantages over conventional grid-based methods in simulating fluid–structure interactions problems involving large deformation. A numerical model has been developed using a modified SPH that implements various improvements reported in the literature. The numerical simulations are parallelized on GPU using CUDA Fortran. The developed numerical model has been validated with existing results in the literature and it captures the deformation and migration of the deformable cell very well. It is observed that the RBC migrates towards the centre and attains similar shape at steady state irrespective of the initial position. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024.