Viscoelastic transient of confined Red Blood Cells

Abstract

The unique ability of a red blood cell to flow through extremely small microcapillaries depends on the viscoelastic properties of its membrane. Here, we study in vitro the response time upon flow startup exhibited by red blood cells confined into microchannels. We show that the characteristic transient time depends on the imposed flow strength, and that such a dependence gives access to both the effective viscosity and the elastic modulus controlling the temporal response of red cells. A simple theoretical analysis of our experimental data, validated by numerical simulations, further allows us to compute an estimate for the two-dimensional membrane viscosity of red blood cells, ${\eta }_{mem}^{2D}\sim 10^{-7}$ N$\cdot$s$\cdot$m${}^{-1}$. By comparing our results with those from previous studies, we discuss and clarify the origin of the discrepancies found in the literature regarding the determination of ${\eta }_{mem}^{2D}$, and reconcile seemingly conflicting conclusions from previous works.

References in corpus (4)

• Dynamics of a viscous vesicle in linear flows
• Dynamics of nearly spherical vesicles in an external flow
• Dynamics and rheology of a dilute suspension of vesicles: higher order theory
• Shape diagram of vesicles in Poiseuille flow

Cited by in corpus (7)

• On the effects of membrane viscosity on transient red blood cell dynamics
• Red blood cell shape transitions and dynamics in time-dependent capillary flows
• 3D tomography of cells in micro-channels
• Dynamics of a large population of red blood cells under shear flow
• Lattice Boltzmann simulations on the tumbling to tank-treading transition: effects of membrane viscosity
• Hydrodynamic pairing of soft particles in a confined flow
• Assessment of coupled bilayer-cytoskeleton modelling strategy for red blood cell dynamics in flow