(7in) Multi-Physics Modeling and Parallel Computing in Biological Flows

Research Interests: My primary research interest is the fluid-solid interaction (FSI) and its applications in the interdisciplinary field of biomedical engineering. My unique advantage is that I have both intensive training in computational modeling (parallel computing) and microfluidic based experiments, with crossing disciplinary background from mechanical engineering to chemical engineering.

Teaching Interests: Transport Phenomena, Fluid Mechanics, Solid Mechanics, Numerical Methods, Scientific Computing, Parallel Computing, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Molecular Dynamics.

Many biological flows involve multiple simultaneous physical phenomena. For example, in thrombosis (blood clotting), the blood flow, red blood cells (RBCs), platelets, and chemical reactions work together to form the blood clot. To simulate this kind of problem, it requires a computational tool that can solve fluid flow, large solid deformation, and chemical reaction concurrently, as all of them are coupled together. In this presentation, a partitioned approach was introduced to solve the coupled multi-physics problem. The fluid flow was solved by the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), while the solid deformation and diffusion were simulated by a particle based method. The coupling was achieved through the immersed boundary method (IBM) so that different physics can exchange information with each other. The developed fluid solid coupling approach was applied to study nanoparticle delivery in microcirculation and neutrophil deformation in platelet clots. To take advantage of parallel computing, the coupling between fluid and solid was carefully designed as an interface between two widely used open source packages: Palabos (parallel lattice Boltzmann solver) and Lammps (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator). The performance test showed that it scaled almost linearly over multiple processors. This work demonstrated an efficient way of simulating coupled multi-physics problems, which has many applications in engineering and medicine.