In the emerging field of 3D bioprinting, cell damage due to large
deformations is considered a main cause for cell death and loss of
functionality inside the printed construct. Those deformations, in turn,
strongly depend on the mechano-elastic response of the cell to the hydrodynamic
stresses experienced during printing. In this work, we present a numerical
model to simulate the deformation of biological cells in arbitrary
three-dimensional flows. We consider cells as an elastic continuum according to
the hyperelastic Mooney-Rivlin model. We then employ force calculations on a
tetrahedralized volume mesh. To calibrate our model, we perform a series of
FluidFM(R) compression experiments with REF52 cells demonstrating that all
three parameters of the Mooney-Rivlin model are required for a good description
of the experimental data at very large deformations up to 80%. In addition, we
validate the model by comparing to previous AFM experiments on bovine
endothelial cells and artificial hydrogel particles. To investigate cell
deformation in flow, we incorporate our model into Lattice Boltzmann
simulations via an Immersed-Boundary algorithm. In linear shear flows, our
model shows excellent agreement with analytical calculations and previous
simulation data.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, Supplementary information included.
Unfortunately, the journal version misses an important contributor. The
correct author list is the one given in this document. Biomech Model
Mechanobiol (2020
