Advanced Constitutive Modeling of the Thixotropic Elasto-Visco-Plastic Behavior of Blood: Description of the Model and Rheological Predictions

This work focuses on the advanced modeling of the thixotropic nature of blood, coupled with an elasto-visco-plastic formulation by invoking a consistent and validated model for TEVP materials. The proposed model has been verified for the adequate description of the rheological behavior of suspensions, introducing a scalar variable that describes dynamically the level of internal microstructure of rouleaux at any instance, capturing accurately the aggregation and disaggregation mechanisms of the RBCs. Also, a non-linear fitting is adopted for the definition of the model’s parameters on limited available experimental data of steady and transient rheometric flows of blood samples. We present the predictability of the new model in various steady and transient rheometric flows, including startup shear, rectangular shear steps, shear cessation, triangular shear steps and LAOS tests. Our model provides predictions for the elasto-thixotropic mechanism in startup shear flows, demonstrating a non-monotonic relationship of the thixotropic index on the shear-rate. The intermittent shear step test reveals the dynamics of the structural reconstruction, which in turn is associated with the aggregation process. Moreover, our model offers robust predictions for less examined tests such as uniaxial elongation, in which normal stress was found to have considerable contribution. Apart from the integrated modeling of blood rheological complexity, our implementation is adequate for multi-dimensional simulations due to its tensorial formalism accomplished with a single time scale for the thixotropic effects, resulting in a low computational cost compared to other TEVP models.