Dynamics of red blood cells in 2d

Cuc Bui¹ ; Vanessa Lleras² ; Olivier Pantz³

¹ Laboratoire J.L. Lions, UPMC Univ Paris 06, UMR 7598, 75005 Paris, France
² Laboratoire de Mathématiques, Université de Franche Comté, CNRS UMR 6623, 16 route de Gray, 25030 Besançon cedex, France
³ CMAP, École Polytechnique, 91128 Palaiseau Cedex, France

ESAIM. Proceedings, Tome 28 (2009), pp. 182-194

Résumé

Blood is essentially composed of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets suspended in a fluid (blood plasma). If it can be considered as a homogeneous fluid when circulating in vessels of large diameter, this approximation is no longer valid when it reaches vessels with diameter of an order of magnitude comparable to that of the cells it carries. In this case, the influence of the cells on the flow can no longer be homogenized. Therefore, the mechanical behavior of red blood cells (which account for of the cells presenting in the blood), their interaction with the surrounding fluid or between themselves (by contact) must be taken into account. Numerical tool plays thus an essential role: it enables to validate the advanced physical models, to access to data difficult to obtain experimentally and to determine the dependence of the flow behavior on the parameters of the model. In this article, we propose a numerical method which allows to take into account these three essential aspects (mechanical behavior of red blood cells, fluid/structures interactions and structures/structures contact interactions). Our study is limited to the two-dimensional case which, although simplistic, allows us to reproduce a quite large range of experimental observations as shown in the numerical simulations obtained.

Détail

DOI : 10.1051/proc/2009046