A phase field approach in the numerical study of the elastic bending energy for vesicle membranes
Journal of Computational Physics
Simulating the deformation of vesicle membranes under elastic bending energy in three dimensions
Journal of Computational Physics
Journal of Computational Physics
SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
Journal of Computational Physics
An implicit immersed boundary method for three-dimensional fluid-membrane interactions
Journal of Computational Physics
Parametric FEM for geometric biomembranes
Journal of Computational Physics
Simulating the dynamics of inextensible vesicles by the penalty immersed boundary method
Journal of Computational Physics
A fast algorithm for simulating vesicle flows in three dimensions
Journal of Computational Physics
Journal of Computational Physics
Journal of Computational Physics
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We present a Lagrangian phase-field method to study the low Reynolds number dynamics of vesicles embedded in a viscous fluid. In contrast to previous approaches, where the field variables are the phase-field and the fluid velocity, here we exploit the fact that the phase-field tracks a material interface to reformulate the problem in terms of the Lagrangian motion of a background medium, containing both the biomembrane and the fluid. We discretize the equations in space with maximum-entropy approximants, carefully shown to perform well in phase-field models of biomembranes in a companion paper. The proposed formulation is variational, lending itself to implicit time-stepping algorithms based on minimization of a time-incremental energy, which are automatically nonlinearly stable. The proposed method deals with two of the major challenges in the numerical treatment of coupled fluid/phase-field models of biomembranes, namely the adaptivity of the grid to resolve the sharp features of the phase-field, and the stiffness of the equations, leading to very small time-steps. In our method, local refinement follows the features of the phase-field as both are advected by the Lagrangian motion, and large time-steps can be robustly chosen in the variational time-stepping algorithm, which also lends itself to time adaptivity. The method is presented in the axisymmetric setting, but it can be directly extended to 3D.