Flow of Dense Soft Particle Suspensions

We investigate the dynamics of deformable, soft particle suspensions in microfluidic flow. A lattice Boltzmann-Brownian Dynamics (LB-BD) approach is developed to capture coupling between particle deformation and fluid field perturbations. The influence of hydrodynamic interactions on particle dynamics is characterized and found in agreement with single and two particle studies. LB-BD is further extended to investigate how particle elasticity, concentration, and shape affect the flow velocity in suspensions of up to 30% particle volume fraction. For single component suspensions, it is found that the more elastic particles achieve higher average velocity due to wall-induced hydrodynamic migration. In binary suspensions, a novel mechanism for particle fractionation based on particle elasticity is found.