Dynamic Deformation Analysis of a Red Blood Cell in Steady and Unsteady Shear Flows

Quantitative evaluation of hemolysis, the breaking open of red blood cells (RBCs), is essential in designing artificial organs. Recently, numerical methods to quantify hemolysis from a measured or calculated macroscopic flow velocity field have been proposed [1]. Nevertheless, their predictive accuracy has not reached a satisfactory level required in practice. This would be because the conventional methods are mostly established based on the hemolysis tests under simple flow conditions and have not well considered deformation of RBCs. For further amelioration of the predictive accuracy, it would be necessary to take into account motion and dynamical deformation of individual RBCs in a flow field.