SIMULATION OF RBC DYNAMICS IN OSCILLATORY FLOW USING SMOOTHED PARTICLE HYDRODYNAMICS

Abstract

The study of red blood cell dynamics is an important research field. Understanding physiologic and pathologic characteristics of red blood cell can provide a new perspective to diagnosis and treatment of several diseases. In this work, a numerical model has been developed using the smoothed particle hydrodynamics which is a Lagrangian, meshless particle method to investigate red blood cell dynamics in oscillatory flow. The developed model is parallelized in graphic processing units using Compute Unified Device Architecture developed by NVIDIA that resulted in a seventeen fold reduction in computational cost. The effect of frequency of oscillation and phase difference on red blood cell dynamics is investigated. In addition, the dynamics of healthy and infected red blood cell in oscillatory flow is compared in this work to understand relevance of oscillatory flow in cell separation devices.