Augmenting the Immersed Boundary Method with Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) for the Modeling of Platelets in Hemodynamic Flows

Abstract: We present a new computational method by extending the Immersed Boundary (IB) method with a spectrally-accurate geometric model based on Radial Basis Function (RBF) interpolation of the Lagrangian structures. Our specific motivation is the modeling of platelets in hemodynamic flows, though we anticipate that our method will be useful in other applications as well. The efficacy of our new RBF-IB method is shown through a series of numerical experiments. Specifically, we compare our method with the traditional IB method in terms of convergence and accuracy, computational cost, maximum stable time-step size and volume loss. We conclude that the RBF-IB method has advantages over the traditional Immersed Boundary method, and is well-suited for modeling of platelets in hemodynamic flows.