Influence of Membrane Slip on Vesicle Dynamics

Vesicles are multiphase fluid systems where a lipid bilayer separates the two fluids. They form model systems for more complicated biological cells and have been proposed for various biotechnologies such as drug delivery systems. Due to the complex nature of the membrane, an understanding of how the properties of said membrane is crucial to advancing the use of vesicles in modern technologies. One less investigated property of these membranes is the ability to slide past each other due to the layers being weakly coupled. From a macroscopic point-of-view, this appears as a jump in the tangential velocity of the surrounding fluid, with the magnitude of this discontinuity depending on membrane properties. Building upon prior works in modeling vesicles with fully coupled membranes, a numerical model is presented capable of modeling vesicles with interfacial slip in general flows. After a brief discussion of the numerical methods involved, including the composition of computational stencils, the model will then be used to explore the dynamics of vesicles in various types of flows as a function of the membrane slip coefficient.