[michaelb]

Dear CFD experts,


I am currently doing my Master thesis by starting a new project. It is about modelling the behaviour of cancer cells in microchannels filled with blood.

As the size of the microchannel is small enough, I am supposing that the blood is behaving as a newtonian fluid. I would like to model the deformation and the path of the cancer cell. Therefore I use an unsteady simulation.
Until now, I have used the Volume Of Fluid method in Fluent with a two fluid phases model. I would like to enhance this model by assigning some viscoelastic properties to the cell.

Here is my question : what is the software that I should use among the followings ? (the ones I can actually access):

Fluent 6.3.26 (with some UDFs, but it seems to be almost impossible to implement vicoelastic models)
Polyflow 3.10 (I haven't seen some opportunities to model two phase flows)
Ansys CFX 11


Any suggestion will be highly appreciated.

Thank you for your time and consideration

Mike

[michaelb]

Does nobody have an answer ?

[sarium]

I honestly don't know the best option between those software but depending on how big is your physics scale you may have to abandon N.S. formulation and look into some particle based model.

this is a paper you could look at

A discrete-particle model of blood dynamics in capillary vessels
Witold Dzwinel, Krzysztof Boryczko and David A. Yuen

[harishg]

You might want to look into OpenFOAM for implementing the viscoelastic model. There has been quite a few recent studies from Univ of Toronto on using OpenFOAM FOR biofluid dynamics.

[michaelb]

@sarium :

thank you for giving me the name of this paper. It is partly justifying some of the modeling choices I've made such as modeling the blood as a newtonian fluid. But it is not said how I should consider the addition of other species (the cancer cell).
I think that I may have to model a interaction between red blood cells and the cancer cell since the difference of size is not significant. This could be achieved by particle based model but the point is that I need to evaluate the deformation of the cancer cell.

Do you think that it could work to inject some particles (Red blood cell) while using the VOF method (for the cancer cell ) in Fluent?

[michaelb]

@ harishg :

thank you for the suggestion. I will have a look at the website and see what I can do with software. Do you think that it can easily be mastered? The point is that I don't have so much time to give some results and I am not so skilled in the use of Linux.

By the way, do you have papers in mind or a research group name from the University of Toronto?

[mettler]

the VOF tutorial for Fluent is pretty good and not hard to understand. Tho, I don't know if it will be able to model viscoelastic part. But, if you can program than a UDF in fluent might be a good way to go.

[michaelb]

Thank you mettler. Indeed, the VOF method in Fluent is quite easy to use when following the tutorial. But for sure Fluent has no viscoelastic model embedded. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Have you ever implemented a viscoelastic model with a Fluent UDF? That seems rather difficult to achieve...

[mettler]

I can't help past the VOF model - I used it for fuel mixtures. I haven't written a viscoelastic UDF. Did you search the fluent.com site and see if anything comes up?

[sammyraj]

Originally Posted by michaelb

@sarium :

thank you for giving me the name of this paper. It is partly justifying some of the modeling choices I've made such as modeling the blood as a newtonian fluid. But it is not said how I should consider the addition of other species (the cancer cell).
I think that I may have to model a interaction between red blood cells and the cancer cell since the difference of size is not significant. This could be achieved by particle based model but the point is that I need to evaluate the deformation of the cancer cell.

Do you think that it could work to inject some particles (Red blood cell) while using the VOF method (for the cancer cell ) in Fluent?

Hi Michaelb,

I can see this thread is very old one, but I am working on same problem as yours. To start with I am new to CFD world and as my project I am working
on modeling blood flow thorough a microchannel. I am trying study the deformation and path of Red blood cells. I am using cfd code fluent.
Can you tell me how to introduce red blood cells or track red blood cells. ?. Shall I use VOF model or other models?. Anyhelp is much appreciated. Thanks in advance. If you need more details please let me know.