No Arabic abstract
We investigate the rheological characteristics of human blood plasma in shear and elongational flows. While we can confirm a Newtonian behavior in shear flow within experimental resolution, we find a viscoelastic behavior of blood plasma in the pure extensional flow of a capillary break-up rheometer. The influence of the viscoelasticity of blood plasma on capillary blood flow is tested in a microfluidic device with a contraction-expansion geometry. Differential pressure measurements revealed that the plasma has a pronounced flow resistance compared to that of pure water. Supplementary measurements indicate that the viscoelasticity of the plasma might even lead to viscoelastic instabilities under certain conditions. Our findings show that the viscoelastic properties of plasma should not be ignored in future studies on blood flow.
The rheological properties of cells and tissues are central to embryonic development and homoeostasis in adult tissues and organs and are closely related to their physiological activities. In this work, we present our study of rheological experiments on cell monolayer under serum starvation compared to that of healthy cell monolayer with full serum. The normal functioning of cells depends on the micronutrient supply provided by the serum in the growth media. Serum starvation is one of the most widely used procedures in cell biology. Serum deficiency may lead to genomic instability, variation in protein expression, chronic diseases, and some specific types of cancers. However, the effect of deprivation of serum concentration on the material properties of cells is still unknown. Therefore, we performed the macro-rheology experiments to investigate the effect of serum starvation on a fully confluent Madin Darby Canine Kidney (MDCK) cell monolayer. The material properties such as storage modulus (G) and loss modulus (G), of the monolayer, were measured using oscillatory shear experiments under serum-free (0% FBS) and full serum (10% FBS) conditions. Additionally, the step strain experiments were performed to gain more insights into the viscoelastic properties of the cell monolayer. Our results indicate that without serum, the loss and storage moduli decrease and do not recover fully even after small deformation. This is because of the lack of nutrients, which may result in many permanent physiological changes. Whereas, the healthy cell monolayer under full serum condition, remains strong & flexible, and can fully recover even from a large deformation at higher strain.
We present experiments on RBCs that flow through microcapillaries under physiological conditions. We show that the RBC clusters form as a subtle imbrication between hydrodynamics interaction and adhesion forces because of plasma proteins. Clusters form along the capillaries and macromolecule-induced adhesion contribute to their stability. However, at high yet physiological flow velocities, shear stresses overcome part of the adhesion forces, and cluster stabilization due to hydrodynamics becomes stronger. For the case of pure hydrodynamic interaction, cell-to-cell distances have a pronounced bimodal distribution. Our 2D-numerical simulations on vesicles captures the transition between adhesive and non-adhesive clusters at different flow velocities.
A finite element analysis of flows of an Oldroyd-B fluid is developed, to simulate blood flow in an arteriovenous fistula. The model uses a combination of a standard conforming finite element approximation for the momentum equation, and the discontinuous Galerkin method, with upwinding, for the equation governing the evolution of the extra stress. The model is verified for a range of values of Weissenberg number We by applying it to the benchmark problem of flow past a cylinder in a channel. The main application is to flow in an arteriovenous fistula, the geometry of which is based on patient-specific data. Results for Oldroyd-B fluids are compared with those for a Newtonian fluid as well as with data from patient-specific velocity MRI scans. Features such as streamlines and regions of recirculation are similar across a range of values of We and the Newtonian case. There is however a strong dependence of maximum wall shear stress on We, with values for the viscoelastic fluid in all cases being higher than that for the Newtonian case.
Sheep are gregarious animals, and they often aggregate into dense, cohesive flocks, especially under stress. In this paper, we use image processing tools to analyze a publicly available aerial video showing a dense sheep flock moving under the stimulus of a shepherding dog. Inspired by the fluidity of the motion, we implement a hydrodynamics approach, extracting velocity fields, and measuring their propagation and correlations in space and time. We find that while the flock overall is stationary, significant dynamics happens at the edges, notably in the form of fluctuations propagating like waves, and large-scale correlations spanning the entire flock. These observations highlight the importance of incorporating interfacial dynamics, for instance in the form of line tension, when using a hydrodynamics framework to model the dynamics of dense, non-polarized swarms.
In a variety of biological processes, eukaryotic cells use cilia to transport flow. Although cilia have a remarkably conserved internal molecular structure, experimental observations report very diverse kinematics. To address this diversity, we determine numerically the kinematics and energetics of the most efficient cilium. Specifically, we compute the time-periodic deformation of a wall-bound elastic filament leading to transport of a surrounding fluid at minimum energetic cost, where the cost is taken to be the positive work done by all internal molecular motors. The optimal kinematics are found to strongly depend on the cilium bending rigidity through a single dimensionless number, the Sperm number, and closely resemble the two-stroke ciliary beating pattern observed experimentally.