Numerical Simulation of Arbitrarily Shaped Particle Transport in an Incompressible Flow

Passive delivery of arbitrarily shaped particles is one of the main concern for several biomedical applications. Properly designed particles, once administrated at the systemic level and transported by the blood flow along the circulatory system, are expected to improve the efficiency of molecule-based therapy and imaging by increasing the mass fraction of therapeutic molecules and tracers that are able to reach their targets. To this purpose different kinds of particle have been presented in the literature, with different composition and chemico-physical properties. The prediction of the transport dynamics of one or more particles (bolus) in a blood vessel becomes of primary importance, the main parameters involved in the phenomenon being: (a) dimension and shape of the particle; (b) Reynolds number based on the flow rate and diameter of the vessel; (c) density of the particle; (d) number of particles in the bolus. The development of suitable computational techniques able to predict such a complex dynamics could help and speed-up the design process, shedding some light onto the basic mechanism of the phenomena of interest.