The bead and spring system with regularised stokeslet to model poroelasticity #

Berk Altunkeyik

15:10 Tuesday in 4Q08.

Part of the Microfluidics and flow in porous media session.

Abstract #

Flows in porous media are ubiquitous and has a wide range applications from waste water treatment to drug delivery. In these applications, porous body may vary in micro to macroscale and depends on this dynamics of the system changes. In biomedical applications at the microscale, these porous media consist a poroelastic structure or “skeleton” mostly made from gels and an interfacial fluid in creeping flow. Hydrogels are soft materials which can absorb or release significant amount of fluid and they are the prime example of porous media.

The combination of porous hydrogels and Stokes flow introduces an interesting challenge due to fluid solid interaction and moving boundaries. We propose a bead and spring system to model poroelastic bodies and use regularised stokeslets to represent Stokes flow in and out of pores. Effects of a number of parameters including porosity, permeability, and Young’s modulus have been investigated in detail and model has been validated against previous analytical and experimental studies. With this new robust method, different poroelastic problems can be modelled without excessive computational cost. While current study is providing important insight for such problems, it also creates the basis for future studies including modelling of responsive hydrogels in stokes flow.