We explore the theoretical foundations for the inclusion of thermal fluctuations in the immersed boundary method for simulating microscale fluid systems with immersed flexible structures, as in cellular and subcellular biology. We investigate in particular the physical validity of the thermal forcing scheme with respect to the coupling of fluid and immersed structural degrees of freedom and non...

Many real-world examples of fluid-structure interaction, including the transit of red blood cells through the narrow slits in the spleen and the intracellular trafficking of vesicles into dendritic spines, involve the near-contact of elastic structures separated by thin layers of fluid. Motivated by such problems, we introduce an immersed boundary method that uses elements of lubrication theory...

When an elastic filament spins in a viscous incompressible fluid it may undergo a whirling instability, as studied asymptotically by Wolgemuth, Powers, and Goldstein [Phys. Rev. Lett., 84 (2000), pp. 16–23]. We use the immersed boundary (IB) method to study the interaction between the elastic filament and the surrounding viscous fluid as governed by the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. T...

Article history: Received 30 October 2012 Received in revised form 14 June 2013 Accepted 13 October 2013 Available online 18 October 2013

The goal of this paper is to examine the evaluation of interfacial stresses using a standard, finite difference based, immersed boundary method (IMBM). This calculation is not trivial for two fundamental reasons. First, the immersed boundary is represented by a localized boundary force which is distributed to the underlying fluid grid by a discretized delta function. Second, this discretized de...

This paper describes a formally second-order accurate version of the immersed boundary method and its application to the computer simulation of blood ow in a three-dimensional model of the human heart.

The immersed boundary method is a general technique for modeling elastic boundaries immersed within a viscous, incompressible fluid. The method has been applied to several biological and engineering systems, including large scale models of the heart and cochlea. These simulations have the potential to improve our basic understanding of the biological systems they model and aid in the developmen...