An adaptive finite element method for the modeling of the equilibrium of red blood cells |
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| Authors: | Aymen Laadhari Pierre Saramito Chaouqi Misbah |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Computer Vision Laboratory, Institute für Bildverarbeitung, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology – ETHZ, Zürich, Switzerland;2. Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann, Informatique et Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble, Université Joseph Fourier and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Grenoble, France;3. Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique, Université Joseph Fourier and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Grenoble, France |
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| Abstract: | This contribution is concerned with the numerical modeling of an isolated red blood cell (RBC), and more generally of phospholipid membranes. We propose an adaptive Eulerian finite element approximation, based on the level set method, of a shape optimization problem arising in the study of RBCs. We simulate the equilibrium shapes that minimize the elastic bending energy under prescribed constraints of fixed volume and surface area. An anisotropic mesh adaptation technique is used in the vicinity of the cell membrane to enhance the robustness of the method. Efficient time and spatial discretizations are considered and implemented. We address in detail the main features of the proposed method, and finally we report several numerical experiments in the two‐dimensional and the three‐dimensional axisymmetric cases. The effectiveness of the numerical method is further demonstrated through numerical comparisons with semi‐analytical solutions provided by a reduced order model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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| Keywords: | finite element method adaptive mesh refinement minimization under constraints shape optimization red blood cell Canham– Helfrich model |
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