Long-range hydrodynamic effect due to a single vesicle in linear flow

¹ Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science - Rehovot, 76100 Israel
² Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot, 76100 Israel
³ Istituto Applicazioni Calcolo, CNR - Via Amendola 122/D, 70126 Bari, Italy

Received: 20 December 2015
Accepted: 9 February 2016

Abstract

Vesicles are involved in a vast variety of transport processes in living organisms. Additionally, they serve as a model for the dynamics of cell suspensions. Predicting the rheological properties of their suspensions is still an open question, as even the interaction of pairs is yet to be fully understood. Here we analyse the effect of a single vesicle, undergoing tank-treading motion, on its surrounding shear flow by studying the induced disturbance field , the difference between the velocity field in its presence and absence. The comparison between experiments and numerical simulations reveals an impressive agreement. Tracking ridges in the disturbance field magnitude landscape, we identify the principal directions along which the velocity difference field is analysed in the vesicle vicinity. The disturbance magnitude is found to be significant up to about 4 vesicle radii and can be described by a power law decay with the distance d from the vesicle . This is consistent with previous experimental results on the separation distance between two interacting vesicles under similar conditions, for which their dynamics is altered. This is an indication of vesicles long-range effect via the disturbance field and calls for the proper incorporation of long-range hydrodynamic interactions when attempting to derive rheological properties of vesicle suspensions.