Analytical Solutions for Shear Deformation and Flow of Red Cell Membrane

Studies of red blood cell deformation have shown that there are a number of membrane material properties that affect the deformation process. In this paper various types of deformation are modeled using geometrical and constitutive simplifications so that the effect of intrinsic elastic and viscous membrane properties and of major geometric constraints is made obvious while other factors are ignored. To this end, numerical solutions are shunned in favor of exact analytical (“closed-form”) solutions to simple and basic membrane deformation problems in order to reveal functional dependence.