Immersed material point method to simulate cellular fluid flow interactions

Investigating blood flow at the cellular level is challenging because of the complex interactions between cells and plasma. Various numerical methods, such as the immersed boundary and the immersed finite element methods, have been reported to simulate an integrated model with cells and plasma. However, these simulation models are limited in predicting large deformations or cellular rupture in blood flow. Interestingly, spring network models have been studied lesser than other methods, even though they can overcome the aforementioned limitations, thereby effectively simulating the cellular transport of blood. In this study, we propose an immersed material point method to simulate fluid-cell interactions by coupling the immersed finite element method with the spring network model. Successful simulation of four cases, including rigid body falling, sphere deformation in a simple shear flow, stretching test in fluid, and shearing test in a simple shear flow, validated the proposed method. Furthermore, as a parametric study, the suggested method predicted a plasma skimming effect.