Simulations of Blood Flow in Plain Cylindrical and Constricted Vessels with Single Cell Resolution

Understanding the physics of blood is challenging due to its nature as a suspension of soft particles and the fact that typical problems involve different scales. This is valid also for numerical investigations. In fact, many computational studies either neglect the existence of discrete cells or resolve relatively few cells very accurately. The authors recently developed a simple and highly efficient yet still particulate model with the aim to bridge the gap between currently applied methods. The present work focuses on its applicability to confined flows in vessels of diameters up to 100 micrometres. For hematocrit values below 30 percent, a dependence of the apparent viscosity on the vessel diameter in agreement with experimental literature data is found.