Haemorheology in dilute, semi-dilute and dense suspensions of red blood cells

We present a numerical analysis of the rheology of a suspension of red blood cells (RBCs) in a wall-bounded shear flow. The flow is assumed as almost inertialess. The suspension of RBCs, modelled as biconcave capsules whose membrane follows the Skalak constitutive law, is simulated for a wide range of viscosity ratios between the cytoplasm and plasma, D 0 : 1-10, for volume fractions up to D 0 : 41 and for different capillary numbers (Ca). Our numerical results show that an RBC at low Ca tends to orient to the shear plane and exhibits so-called rolling motion, a stable mode with higher intrinsic viscosity than the so-called tumbling motion. As Ca increases, the mode shifts from the rolling to the swinging motion. Hydrodynamic interactions (higher volume fraction) also allow RBCs to exhibit tumbling or swinging motions resulting in a drop of the intrinsic viscosity for dilute and semi-dilute suspensions. Because of this mode change, conventional ways of modelling the relative viscosity as a polynomial function of cannot be simply applied in suspensions of RBCs at low volume fractions. The relative viscosity for high volume fractions, however, can be well described as a function of an effective volume fraction, defined by the volume of spheres of radius equal to the semi-middle axis of a deformed RBC. We find that the relative viscosity successfully collapses on a single nonlinear curve independently of except for the case with Ca > 0 : 4, where the fit works only in the case of low/ moderate volume fraction, and fails in the case of a fully dense suspension.