Modeling Elastic Objects in Fluid Flow with Biomedical Applications

Microfluidics is a rapidly developing research field that has various applications in biomedicine. Microfluidic devices can be used to capture rare cells from blood samples, to analyze flows with diseased cells or to perform separation tasks. In order to optimize the design of these devices, a good working model of cells traveling in blood plasma or other biological fluids is needed. This work describes such model and approaches taken towards its development. It is a full 3D computational model with two-way coupling of fluid and immersed objects capable of resolving elastic deformations based on physical principles both in detailed simulations of single or few objects and in large simulations of up to thousands of cells. This work also describes the procedures used for validation and calibration of the model, novel approach to preservation of local area of the membrane, new membrane collision algorithm capable of resolving intersecting membranes, comparison of various seeding approaches for dense suspensions and a simulation study that illustrates model capabilities and its usefulness in the future optimization of microfluidic devices.