Blood rheology shows viscoelastic, thixotropic (using a structural parameter λ) and viscoplastic characteristics shown in steady stress vs. shear-rate data.

Recent work modeling the rheological behavior of human blood indicates that blood has all the hallmark features of a complex material, including shear-thinning, viscoelastic behavior, yield stress, and thixotropy. There is renewed interest in the modeling of human blood with thixo-elasto-visco-plastic rheological models. Previous work [Armstrong and Tussing, Phys. Fluids 32, 094111 (2020)] has led to the development of the enhanced thixotropic viscoelastic model for blood (ethixo-mHAWB; called here, after a minor modification, ETV) that incorporates viscoelasticity to a thixotropic model for the stress contributed by the rouleaux aggregates, in addition to describing using a nonlinear viscoelastic model the stress contributed by the individual red blood cells deforming under the action of the flow. This model has shown superior performance in fitting human blood steady state and transient rheological data from a strain-controlled rheometer [Horner et al., J. Rheol. 62, 577–591 (2018); 63, 799–813 (2019)] as compared to other alternate models. In the present work, we first develop another variant of the ETV model, the enhanced structural stress thixotropic-viscoelastic (ESSTV) model, and the modification patterned following an elastoviscoplastic model developed recently [Varchanis et al., J. Rheol. 63, 609–639 (2019)]. We develop full tensorial stress formulations of the rouleaux stresses for both the above-mentioned models, resulting in the t-ETV and t-ESSTV models. We use steady state and step-ups, and step-downs in shear rate data to independently fit the parameters of all before-mentioned models. We compare predictions against experimental data obtained on small, large, and unidirectional large amplitude oscillatory shear conditions. We find that the full tensor stress formulations t-ETV and t-ESSTV significantly improved the predictive capability of the earlier ETV model.

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In this work, we outline the development of a thermodynamically consistent microscopic model for a suspension of aggregating particles under arbitrary, inertia-less deformation. As a proof-of-concept, we show how the combination of a simplified population-balance-based description of the aggregating particle microstructure along with the use of the single-generator bracket description of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, which leads naturally to the formulation of the model equations. Notable elements of the model are a lognormal distribution for the aggregate size population, a population balance-based model of the aggregation and breakup processes and a conformation tensor-based viscoelastic description of the elastic network of the particle aggregates. The resulting example model is evaluated in steady and transient shear forces and elongational flows and shown to offer predictions that are consistent with observed rheological behavior of typical systems of aggregating particles. Additionally, an expression for the total entropy production is also provided that allows one to judge the thermodynamic consistency and to evaluate the importance of the various dissipative phenomena involved in given flow processes.

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