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Applied Math Colloquium

Friday, March 14, 2014, 11:30 AM
Cullimore Lecture Hall, Lecture Hall II
New Jersey Institute of Technology

On the motion of a red blood cell in bounded Poiseuille flow

Tsorng-Whay Pan

University of Houston

Abstract

Deformation of a red blood cell in bounded two-dimensional Poiseuille flows is studied by using an immersed boundary method. An elastic spring model is applied to simulate the membrane of a RBC membrane. We investigate the motion and the deformation of a single RBC by varying the swelling ratio, the initial cell inclination angle, the Reynolds number, the membrane bending stiffness, and the microchannel height. Both oscillation and swing motions are observed. To understand such motions, we have studied the motion of a neutrally buoyant rigid particle of the same shape in bounded Poiseuille flows via a distributed Lagrange multiplier/fictitious domain method.