Heterogeneous partition of cellular blood-borne nanoparticles through microvascular bifurcations.

Blood flowing through microvascular bifurcations has been an active research topic for many decades, while the partitioning pattern of nanoscale solutes in the blood remains relatively unexplored. Here we demonstrate a multiscale computational framework for direct numerical simulation of the nanoparticle (NP) partitioning through physiologically relevant vascular bifurcations in the presence of red blood cells (RBCs). The computational framework is established by embedding a particulate suspension inflow-outflow boundary condition into a multiscale blood flow solver. The computational framework is verified by recovering a tubular blood flow without a bifurcation and validated against the experimental measurement of an intravital bifurcation flow. The classic Zweifach-Fung (ZF) effect is shown to be well captured by the method. Moreover, we observe that NPs exhibit a ZF-like heterogeneous partition in response to the heterogeneous partition of the RBC phase. The NP partitioning prioritizes the high-flow-rate daughter branch except for extreme (large or small) suspension flow partition ratios under which the complete phase separation tends to occur. By analyzing the flow field and the particle trajectories, we show that the ZF-like heterogeneity in the NP partition can be explained by the RBC-entrainment effect caused by the deviation of the flow separatrix preceded by the tank treading of RBCs near the bifurcation junction. The recovery of homogeneity in the NP partition under extreme flow partition ratios is due to the plasma skimming of NPs in the cell-free layer. These findings, based on the multiscale computational framework, provide biophysical insights to the heterogeneous distribution of NPs in microvascular beds that are observed pathophysiologically.

Entropically damped form of artificial compressibility for explicit simulation of incompressible flow.

An alternative artificial compressibility (AC) scheme is proposed to allow the explicit simulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes (INS) equations. Traditional AC schemes rely on an artificial equation of state that gives the pressure as a function of the density, which is known to enforce isentropic behavior. This behavior is nonideal, especially in viscously dominated flows. An alternative, the entropically damped artificial compressibility (EDAC) method, is proposed that employs a thermodynamic constraint to damp the pressure oscillations inherent to AC methods. The EDAC method converges to the INS in the low-Mach limit, and is consistent in both the low- and high-Reynolds-number limits, unlike standard AC schemes. The proposed EDAC method is discretized using a simple finite-difference scheme and is compared with traditional AC schemes as well as the lattice-Boltzmann method for steady lid-driven cavity flow and a transient traveling-wave problem. The EDAC method is shown to be beneficial in damping pressure and velocity-divergence oscillations when performing transient simulations. The EDAC method follows a similar derivation to the kinetically reduced local Navier-Stokes (KRLNS) method [Borok et al., Phys. Rev. E 76, 066704 (2007)]; however, the EDAC method does not rely on the grand potential as the thermodynamic variable, but instead uses the more common pressure-velocity system. Additionally, a term neglected in the KRLNS is identified that is important for accurately approximating the INS equations.