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Morphology, repulsion, and ordering of red blood cells in viscoelastic flows under confinement
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Yazdan Rashidi ,
Ian Graham,
Paulo E. Arratia ,
Francesco Del Giudice ,
Christian Wagner
Soft Matter, Volume: 20, Issue: 25, Pages: 4950 - 4963
Swansea University Author:
Francesco Del Giudice
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DOI (Published version): 10.1039/d4sm00446a
Abstract
Red blood cells (RBC), the primary carriers of oxygen in the body, play a crucial role across several biomedical applications, while also being an essential model system of a deformable object in the microfluidics and soft matter fields. However, RBC behavior in viscoelastic liquids, which holds pro...
| Published in: | Soft Matter |
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| ISSN: | 1744-683X 1744-6848 |
| Published: |
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
2024
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa69170 |
| Abstract: |
Red blood cells (RBC), the primary carriers of oxygen in the body, play a crucial role across several biomedical applications, while also being an essential model system of a deformable object in the microfluidics and soft matter fields. However, RBC behavior in viscoelastic liquids, which holds promise in enhancing microfluidic diagnostic applications, remains poorly studied. We here show that using viscoelastic polymer solutions as a suspending carrier causes changes in the clustering and shape of flowing RBC in microfluidic flows when compared to a standard Newtonian suspending liquid. Additionally, when the local RBC concentration increases to a point where hydrodynamic interactions take place, we observe the formation of equally-spaced RBC structures, resembling the viscoelasticity-driven ordered particles observed previously in the literature, thus providing the first experimental evidence of viscoelasticity-driven cell ordering. The observed RBC ordering, unaffected by polymer molecular architecture, persists as long as the surrounding medium exhibits shear-thinning, viscoelastic properties. Complementary numerical simulations reveal that viscoelasticity-induced repulsion between RBCs leads to equidistant structures, with shear-thinning modulating this effect. Our results open the way for the development of new biomedical technologies based on the use of viscoelastic liquids while also clarifying fundamental aspects related to multibody hydrodynamic interactions in viscoelastic microfluidic flows. |
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| College: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering |
| Funders: |
This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number 349558021 (WA 1336/13-1 and RE 5025/1-2). Y. R. acknowledges funding by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 860436—EVIDENCE. F. D. G. acknowledges partial support from EPSRC (Grant no. EP/S036490/1). |
| Issue: |
25 |
| Start Page: |
4950 |
| End Page: |
4963 |