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3D numerical simulation of white blood cell margination in arterioles – finished

On a microscopic scale blood contains cellular components. Among the cellular elements, the main constituents are red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets, which form a suspension together with the plasma. Within the project, we will perform three-dimensional cellular simulations and examinations of blood flows in arterioles which are vessel sections of diameters about an order of magnitude larger than the typical size of a red blood cell (8 μm).The calculation will use a framework called HemoCell, which is based on an open source lattice-Boltzmann solver, Palabos. HemoCell combines the Immersed Boundary method with the lattice-Boltzmann method, which is designed to simulate suspensions of deformable cells. The material model in HemoCell has been validated for red blood cells, and the purpose of this project is to develop a new material model to simulate the exact mechanical properties of white blood cells. Having such a material model will allow the in-silico examination of the cellular behaviour of white blood cells, such as their margination. Due to the extremely fine time and spatial resolution of the cellular simulations, calculations on desktop computers can take a very long time, based on our previous experience. The good parallelization of the HemoCell framework (MPI, close to linear strong-scaling) makes it possible to perform this simulation on a supercomputer.

Project owner:
Joó-Kovács Roland (Hidrodinamikai Rendszerek Tanszék)
Members:
Hidrodinamikai Rendszerek Tanszék (GPK-VIZGEP)
Cooperations:

University of Amsterdam, Institute of Informatics, Computational Science Lab