We consider numerical algorithms for the simulation of the rheology of two-dimensional vesicles suspended in a viscous Stokesian fluid. The vesicle evolution dynamics is governed by hydrodynamic and elastic forces. The elastic forces are due to local inextensibility of the vesicle membrane and resistance to bending. Numerically resolving vesicle flows poses several challenges. For example, we need to resolve moving interfaces, address stiffness due to bending, enforce the inextensibility constraint, and efficiently compute the (non-negligible) long-range hydrodynamic interactions. Our method is based on the work of {\em Rahimian, Veerapaneni, and Biros, "Dynamic simulation of locally inextensible vesicles suspended in an arbitrary two-dimensional domain, a boundary integral method", Journal of Computational Physics, 229 (18), 2010}. It is a boundary integral formulation of the Stokes equations coupled to the interface mass continuity and force balance. We extend the algorithms presented in that paper to increase the robustness of the method and enable simulations with concentrated suspensions. In particular, we propose a scheme in which both intra-vesicle and inter-vesicle interactions are treated semi-implicitly. In addition we use special integration for near-singular integrals and we introduce a spectrally accurate collision detection scheme. We test the proposed methodologies on both unconfined and confined flows for vesicles whose internal fluid may have a viscosity contrast with the bulk medium. Our experiments demonstrate the importance of treating both intra-vesicle and inter-vesicle interactions accurately

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We present an adaptive arbitrary-order accurate time-stepping numerical scheme for the flow of vesicles suspended in Stokesian fluids. Our scheme can be summarized as an approximate implicit spectral deferred correction (SDC) method. Applying a textbook fully implicit SDC scheme to vesicle flows is prohibitively expensive. For this reason we introduce several approximations. Our scheme is based on a semi-implicit linearized low-order time stepping method. (Our discretization is spectrally accurate in space.) We also use invariant properties of vesicle flows, constant area and boundary length in two dimensions, to reduce the computational cost of error estimation for adaptive time stepping. We present results in two dimensions for single-vesicle flows, constricted geometry flows, converging flows, and flows in a Couette apparatus. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed scheme enables automatic selection of the step size and high-order accuracy.

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We develop numerical methods to simulate the fluid-mechanical erosion of many bodies in two-dimensional Stokes flow. The broad aim is to simulate the erosion of a porous medium (e.g. groundwater flow) with grainscale resolution. Our fluid solver is based on a second-kind boundary integral formulation of the Stokes equations that is discretized with a spectrally-accurate Nyström method and solved with fast-multipoleaccelerated GMRES. The fluid solver provides the surface shear stress which is used to advance solid boundaries. We regularize interface evolution via curvature penalization using the θ-L formulation, which affords numerically stable treatment of stiff terms and therefore permits large time steps. The overall accuracy of our method is spectral in space and second-order in time. The method is computationally efficient, with the fluid solver requiring O(N ) operations per GMRES iteration, a mesh-independent number of GMRES iterations, and a one-time O(N 2 ) computation to compute the shear stress. We benchmark single-body results against analytical predictions for the limiting morphology and vanishing rate. Multibody simulations reveal the spontaneous formation of channels between bodies of close initial proximity. The channelization is associated with a dramatic reduction in the resistance of the porous medium, much more than would be expected from the reduction in grain size alone.