Abstract:To study the deformation of red blood cells (RBCs) acted upon by an external force, a coarse grained network model of RBCs’ membrane presented recently was adopted. In the model, the membrane was constructed by a network of nonlinear springs, and the wormlike chain (WLC) spring model was applied. The free energy of the system took the in plane free energy, bending energy, area and volume conservation constraints into consideration. The RBCs model was handled by a systematic coarse graining procedure, and the coarse grained model was applied to simulating the stretching deformation of RBCs by using dissipative particle dynamics(DPD). The scaling procedure relating the model’s non dimensional units to physical units was discussed in detail, and the force acting on the vertices due to bend energy, area and volume conservation constraints were analyzed. The simulating results were compared with the experiments results. The results show that the coarse grained model is efficient in simulating the deformation of RBCs, but the model is influenced by many parameters, and it needs a further improving.
