Cilia and flagella are self-actuated microtubule-based structures that are present on many cell surfaces, ranging from the outer surface of single-cell organisms to the internal epithelial surfaces in larger animals. A fast and robust numerical method that simulates the coupled hydrodynamics of cilia and the constituent particles in the fluid such as rigid particles, drops or cells would be useful to not only understand several disease and developmental pathologies due to ciliary dysfunction but also to design microfluidic chips with ciliated cultures for some targeted functionality---e.g., maximizing fluid transport or particle mixing. In this paper, we develop a hybrid numerical method that employs a boundary integral method for handling the confining geometries and the constituent rigid particles and the method of regularized Stokeslets for handling the cilia. We provide several examples demonstrating the effects of confining geometries on cilia-generated fluid mixing as well as the cilia-particle hydrodynamics.
In a variety of physical situations, a bulk viscous flow is induced by a distribution of surface velocities, for example in diffusiophoresis (as a result of chemical gradients) and above carpets of cilia (as a result of biological activity). When such boundary-driven flows are used to pump fluids, the primary quantity of interest is the induced flow rate. In this letter we propose a method, based on the reciprocal theorem of Stokes flows, to compute the net flow rate for arbitrary flow distribution and periodic pump geometry using solely stress information from a dual Poiseuille-like problem. …
Surface-driven flows are ubiquitous in nature, from subcellular cytoplasmic streaming to organ-scale ciliary arrays. Here, we model how confined geometries can be used to engineer complex hydrodynamic patterns driven by activity prescribed solely on the boundary. Specifically, we simulate light-controlled surface-driven active matter, probing the emergent properties of a suspension of active colloids that can bind and unbind pre-patterned surfaces of a closed microchamber, together creating an active carpet. The attached colloids generate large scale flows that in turn can advect detached part…
The use of adaptive spatial resolution to simulate flows of practical interest using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is of considerable importance. Recently, Muta and Ramachandran [1] have proposed an efficient adaptive SPH method which is capable of handling large changes in particle resolution. This allows the authors to simulate problems with much fewer particles than was possible earlier. The method was not demonstrated or tested with moving bodies or multiple bodies. In addition, the original method employed a large number of background particles to determine the spatial resolution …
Bernaise (Binary ElectRohydrodyNAmIc SolvEr) is a flexible high-level finite element solver of two-phase electrohydrodynamic flow in complex geometries. Two-phase flow with electrolytes is relevant across a broad range of systems and scales, from 'lab-on-a-chip' devices for medical diagnostics to enhanced oil recovery at the reservoir scale. For the strongly coupled multi-physics problem, we employ a recently developed thermodynamically consistent model which combines a generalized Nernst-Planck equation for ion transport, the Poisson equation for electrostatics, the Cahn-Hilliard equation for…
Immersogeometric analysis (IMGA) is a geometrically flexible method that enables one to perform multiphysics analysis directly using complex computer-aided design (CAD) models. In this paper, we develop a novel IMGA approach for simulating incompressible and compressible flows around complex geometries represented by point clouds. The point cloud object's geometry is represented using a set of unstructured points in the Euclidean space with (possible) orientation information in the form of surface normals. Due to the absence of topological information in the point cloud model, there are no gua…
Geometry-free prediction of inertial lift forces in microfluidic devices using deep learning
Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto（机械与工业工程系，多伦多大学）；Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University（机械工程，普渡大学）；Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Toronto（材料科学与工程系，多伦多大学）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto（生物医学工程研究所，多伦多大学）
A new consistent, spatially adaptive, smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method for Fluid-Structure Interactions (FSI) is presented. The method combines several attributes that have not been simultaneously satisfied by other SPH methods. Specifically, it is second-order convergent; it allows for resolutions spatially adapted with moving (translating and rotating) boundaries of arbitrary geometries; and, it accelerates the FSI solution as the adaptive approach leads to fewer degrees of freedom without sacrificing accuracy. The key ingredients in the method are a consistent discretization of …
Numerical simulations of cardiovascular mass transport pose significant challenges due to the wide range of Péclet numbers and backflow at Neumann boundaries. In this paper we present and discuss several numerical tools to address these challenges in the context of a stabilized finite element computational framework. To overcome numerical instabilities when backflow occurs at Neumann boundaries, we propose an approach based on the prescription of the total flux. In addition, we introduce a "consistent flux" outflow boundary condition and demonstrate its superior performance over the traditiona…
We introduce a new heterogeneous multi-scale method for the simulation of flows of non-Newtonian fluids in general geometries and present its application to paradigmatic two-dimensional flows of polymeric fluids. Our method combines micro-scale data from non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) with macro-scale continuum equations to achieve a data-driven prediction of complex flows. At the continuum level, the method is model-free, since the Cauchy stress tensor is determined locally in space and time from NEMD data. The modelling effort is thus limited to the identification of suitable inte…
We present a thermodynamically consistent model of a ternary fluid interacting with elastic membranes. Following a free-energy modelling approach and taking into account the thermodynamics laws, we derive the equations governing the ternary fluid flow and dynamics of the membranes. We also provide the numerical framework for simulating such fluid-structure interaction problems. It is based on the lattice Boltzmann method, employed for resolving the evolution equations of the ternary fluid in an Eulerian description, coupled to the immersed boundary method, allowing for the membrane equations o…
We present a numerical method specifically designed for simulating three-dimensional fluid--structure interaction (FSI) problems based on the reference map technique (RMT). The RMT is a fully Eulerian FSI numerical method that allows fluids and large-deformation elastic solids to be represented on a single fixed computational grid. This eliminates the need for meshing complex geometries typical in other FSI approaches, and greatly simplifies the coupling between fluid and solids. We develop the first three-dimensional implementation of the RMT, parallelized using the distributed memory paradig…
