Erythrocyte dynamics in flow affects blood rheology

V. Vitkova , A. Farutin , B. Polack (1) , C. Misbah (2) , T. Podgorski (2)

1 TheREx
2 LIPhy - Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique [Saint Martin d’Hères]

Normal blood consists of highly deformable particles (red blood cells, RBC, or erythrocytes) suspended in a Newtonian fluid (blood plasma). As a rough physical model of erythrocytes, giant unilamellar vesicles (GUV) are successfully used to probe their membrane properties. In shear flows vesicles and red blood cells show rich variety of dynamical behaviours influencing the rheological properties of their suspensions. Here, we focus on new experimental aspects of the problem in the case, when a combination of an oscillatory shear rate and a basic constant shear rate is applied to suspensions. Experimental examples with concentrated RBC suspensions are presented together with a discussion on the importance of the superposition of a constant shear flow to the pure oscillation, which is usually used to extract the viscoelastic properties of a complex fluid.

Domaines: Physique Classique [physics.class-ph]

V. Vitkova, A. Farutin, B. Polack, C. Misbah, T. Podgorski. Erythrocyte dynamics in flow affects blood rheology. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2012, 398, pp.2027. ⟨10.1088/1742-6596/398/1/012027⟩. ⟨hal-00909449⟩