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In this paper, we develop a new boundary integral equation formulation that describes the coupled electro- and hydro-dynamics of a vesicle suspended in a viscous fluid and subjected to external flow and electric fields. The dynamics of the vesicle are characterized by a competition between the elastic, electric and viscous forces on its membrane. The classical Taylor–Melcher leaky-dielectric model is employed for the electric response of the vesicle and the Helfrich energy model combined with local inextensibility is employed for its elastic response. The coupled governing equations for the vesicle position and its transmembrane electric potential are solved using a numerical method that is spectrally accurate in space and first-order in time. The method uses a semi-implicit time-stepping scheme to overcome the numerical stiffness associated with the governing equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A multiscale continuum model is constructed for a mechanosensitive (MS) channel gated by tension in a lipid bilayer membrane under stresses due to fluid flows. We illustrate that for typical physiological conditions vesicle hydrodynamics driven by a fluid flow may render the membrane tension sufficiently large to gate a MS channel open. In particular, we focus on the dynamic opening/ closing of a MS channel in a vesicle membrane under a planar shear flow and a pressure-driven flow across a constriction channel. Our modeling and numerical simulation results quantify the critical flow strength or flow channel geometry for intracellular transport through a MS channel. In particular, we determine the percentage of MS channels that are open or closed as a function of the relevant measure of flow strength. The modeling and simulation results imply that for fluid flows that are physiologically relevant and realizable in microfluidic configurations stress-induced intracellular transport across the lipid membrane can be achieved by the gating of reconstituted MS channels, which can be useful for designing drug delivery in medical therapy and understanding complicated mechanotransduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Vesicles are locally-inextensible fluid membranes that can sustain bending. In this paper, we extend the study of Veerapaneni et al. [S.K. Veerapaneni, D. Gueyffier, G. Biros, D. Zorin, A numerical method for simulating the dynamics of 3D axisymmetric vesicles suspended in viscous flows, Journal of Computational Physics 228 (19) (2009) 7233–7249] to general non-axisymmetric vesicle flows in three dimensions. Although the main components of the algorithm are similar in spirit to the axisymmetric case (spectral approximation in space, semi-implicit time-stepping scheme), important new elements need to be introduced for a full 3D method. In particular, spatial quantities are discretized using spherical harmonics, and quadrature rules for singular surface integrals need to be adapted to this case; an algorithm for surface reparameterization is needed to ensure stability of the time-stepping scheme, and spectral filtering is introduced to maintain reasonable accuracy while minimizing computational costs. To characterize the stability of the scheme and to construct preconditioners for the iterative linear system solvers used in the semi-implicit time-stepping scheme, we perform a spectral analysis of the evolution operator on the unit sphere. By introducing these algorithmic components, we obtain a time-stepping scheme that circumvents the stability constraint on the time-step and achieves spectral accuracy in space. We present results to analyze the cost and convergence rates of the overall scheme. To illustrate the applicability of the new method, we consider a few vesicle-flow interaction problems: a single vesicle in relaxation, sedimentation, shear flows, and many-vesicle flows. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We consider numerical algorithms for the simulation of hydrodynamics of two-dimensional vesicles suspended in a viscous Stokesian fluid. The motion of vesicles is governed by the interplay between hydrodynamic and elastic forces. Continuum models of vesicles use a two-phase fluid system with interfacial forces that include tension (to maintain local “surface” inextensibility) and bending. Vesicle flows are challenging to simulate. On the one hand, explicit time-stepping schemes suffer from a severe stability constraint due to the stiffness related to high-order spatial derivatives in the bending term. On the other hand, implicit time-stepping schemes can be expensive because they require the solution of a set of nonlinear equations at each time step. Our method is an extension of the work of Veerapaneni et al. [S.K. Veerapaneni, D. Gueyffier, D. Zorin, G. Biros, A boundary integral method for simulating the dynamics of inextensible vesicles suspended in a viscous fluid in 2D, Journal of Computational Physics 228(7) (2009) 2334–2353], in which a semi-implicit time-marching scheme based on a boundary integral formulation of the Stokes problem for vesicles in an unbounded medium was proposed. In this paper, we consider two important generalizations: (i) confined flows within arbitrary-shaped stationary/moving geometries; and (ii) flows in which the interior (to the vesicle) and exterior fluids have different viscosity. In the rest of the paper, we will refer to this as the “viscosity contrast”. These two problems require solving additional integral equations and cause nontrivial modifications to the previous numerical scheme. Our method does not have severe time-step stability constraints and its computational cost-per-time-step is comparable to that of an explicit scheme. The discretization is pseudo-spectral in space, and multistep BDF in time. We conduct numerical experiments to investigate the stability, accuracy and the computational cost of the algorithm. Overall, our method achieves several orders of magnitude speed-up compared to standard explicit schemes. As a preliminary validation of our scheme, we study the dependence of the inclination angle of a single vesicle in shear flow on the viscosity contrast and the reduced area of the vesicle, the lateral migration of vesicles in shear flow, the dispersion of two vesicles, and the effective viscosity of a dilute suspension of vesicles. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We extend [Shravan K. Veerapaneni, Denis Gueyffier, Denis Zorin, George Biros, A boundary integral method for simulating the dynamics of inextensible vesicles suspended in a viscous fluid in 2D, Journal of Computational Physics 228(7) (2009) 2334–2353] to the case of three-dimensional axisymmetric vesicles of spherical or toroidal topology immersed in viscous flows. Although the main components of the algorithm are similar in spirit to the 2D case—spectral approximation in space, semi-implicit time-stepping scheme—the main differences are that the bending and viscous force require new analysis, the linearization for the semi-implicit schemes must be rederived, a fully implicit scheme must be used for the toroidal topology to eliminate a CFL-type restriction and a novel numerical scheme for the evaluation of the 3D Stokes single layer potential on an axisymmetric surface is necessary to speed up the calculations. By introducing these novel components, we obtain a time-scheme that experimentally is unconditionally stable, has low cost per time step, and is third-order accurate in time. We present numerical results to analyze the cost and convergence rates of the scheme. To verify the solver, we compare it to a constrained variational approach to compute equilibrium shapes that does not involve interactions with a viscous fluid. To illustrate the applicability of method, we consider a few vesicle-flow interaction problems: the sedimentation of a vesicle, interactions of one and three vesicles with a background Poiseuille flow. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Using a rod theory formulation, we derive equations of state for a thin elastic membrane subjected to several different boundary conditions--clamped, simply supported, and periodic. The former is applicable to membranes supported on a softer substrate and subjected to uniaxial compression. We show that a wider family of quasistatic equilibrium shapes exist beyond the previously obtained analytical solutions. In the latter case of periodic membranes, we were able to derive exact solutions in terms of elliptic functions. These equilibria are verified by considering a fluid-structure interaction problem of a periodic, length-preserving bilipid membrane modeled by the Helfrich energy immersed in a viscous fluid. Starting from an arbitrary shape, the membrane dynamics to equilibrium are simulated using a boundary integral method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]