Cellular Level In-silico Modeling of Blood Rheology with An Improved Material Model for Red Blood Cells

Gábor Závodszky, Britt van Rooij, Victor Azizi, Alfons Hoekstra

Many of the intriguing properties of blood originate from its cellular nature. Therefore, accurate modeling of blood flow related phenomena requires a description of the dynamics at the level of individual cells. This, however, presents several computational challenges that can only be addressed by high performance computing. We present Hemocell, a parallel computing framework which implements validated mechanical models for red blood cells and is capable of reproducing the emergent transport characteristics of such a complex cellular system. It is computationally capable of handling large domain sizes, thus it is able to bridge the cell-based micro-scale and macroscopic domains. We introduce a new material model for resolving the mechanical responses of red blood cell membranes under various flow conditions and compare it with a well established model. Our new constitutive model has similar accuracy under relaxed flow conditions, however, it performs better for shear rates over 1,500 s(-1). We also introduce a new method to generate randomized initial conditions for dense mixtures of different cell types free of initial positioning artifacts.