Flow visualization of erythrocytes motion and deformation in microchannel

The dimension of erythrocyte is close to capillary diameter and in microcirculation blood should be treated as a two-phase flow system, i.e., erythrocytes suspended in plasma. The rheological property of erythrocytes will significantly influence the hemodynamics. In our experiment, the motion and deformation of erythrocytes in a microfluidic chip with rectangular cross-section microchannel was captured by optical microscope and high speed CCD camera. The aggregation, deformation and common movement forms of erythrocytes were observed under different viscosity, hematocrit and velocity. It was found that erythrocytes behaved a regular biconcave disc shape at low velocity and low-to-medium viscosity, and always rolled and rotated themselves in their movement. At high velocity and medium viscosity, RBCs elongated obviously along the flow direction and presented a flat oval shape together with a tank-treading motion (TTM).