Numerical study of viscosity and inertial effects on tank-treading and tumbling motions of vesicles under shear flow

An inextensible vesicle under shear flow experiences a tank-treading motion on its membrane if the viscosity contrast between the interior and exterior fluids is small. Above a critical threshold of viscosity contrast, the vesicle undergoes a tumbling bifurcation. In this paper, we extend our previous work [Kim and Lai, J. Comput. Phys. 229, 4840 (2010)] to the case of different viscosity and investigate the transition between the tank-treading and tumbling motions in detail. The present numerical results are in a good agreement with other numerical and theoretical studies qualitatively. In addition, we study the inertial effect on this transition and find that the inertial effect might inhibit the tumbling motion in favor of the tank-treading motion, which is observed recently in the literature. The critical viscosity contrast for the transition to the tumbling motion usually increases as the reduced area increases in the Stokes regime. However, we surprisingly observe that the critical viscosity contrast decreases as the reduced area increases to some point in the flow of slightly higher Reynolds number. Our numerical result also shows that the inertial effect has stronger inhibition to tumbling motion when the reduced area is small. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.86.066321