Dynamics Of Blood Cell Suspensions In Microflows PDF Download

Blood is the primary transport medium in the human body that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells, transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells and responds to injury and inflammation. It is complex in the microstructural and mechanical sense, being multiphase non-Newtonian viscoelastic fluid. The physical nature of blood as a multiphase fluid is intimately related to its biological functions. For flow at micron scales, the concentration of red blood cells (RBCs) is higher near the center of the channel and a red cell-free layer is found near the endothelial wall. White blood cells and platelets are also distributed nonuniformly in flow, but in contrast to red cells they are preferentially found near the walls of the flow channel, a phenomenon called "margination''. Origins of the flow-induced segregation and margination is not understood and is of great application in targeted drug delivery, diagnostics, cell sorting and filtration and many other microfluidic applications. The simulation results and subsequent theoretical development done in this work points, for the first time, towards a unified understanding of how physical parameters of particles like blood component or drug carriers can affect their margination propensity and result in flow induced segregation. Most importantly, the mechanistic nature of the simplified drift-diffusion theory presented here leads to substantial and systematic insight into the origin of margination; this study will complement detailed simulations and experiments in guiding the development of technologies involving blood and other multicomponent suspensions at microscales. A novel model for RBC is presented which comprehensively captures its key membrane properties and reveal multiple dynamical modes of single RBC in shear flow. We discovered some new RBC motions and present a comprehensive phase diagram of RBC dynamics. In simulation of RBC suspension with long-chained polymer additives, polymers are seen to suppress endothelial wall-induced migration to the center of channel and shear-induced diffusion of RBCs resulting in reduced cell-free layer thickness and paradoxically the resistance to flow; explaining beneficial hemodynamic effect and improved survival seen upon addition of polymers in animal models.