Year: 2017
Communications in Computational Physics, Vol. 21 (2017), Iss. 1 : pp. 40–64
Abstract
Lipid vesicles appear ubiquitously in biological systems. Understanding how the mechanical and intermolecular interactions deform vesicle membranes is a fundamental question in biophysics. In this article we develop a fast algorithm to compute the surface configurations of lipid vesicles by introducing surface harmonic functions to approximate the membrane surface. This parameterization allows an analytical computation of the membrane curvature energy and its gradient for the efficient minimization of the curvature energy using a nonlinear conjugate gradient method. Our approach drastically reduces the degrees of freedom for approximating the membrane surfaces compared to the previously developed finite element and finite difference methods. Vesicle deformations with a reduced volume larger than 0.65 can be well approximated by using as small as 49 surface harmonic functions. The method thus has a great potential to reduce the computational expense of tracking multiple vesicles which deform for their interaction with external fields.
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Journal Article Details
Publisher Name: Global Science Press
Language: English
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4208/cicp.OA-2015-0029
Communications in Computational Physics, Vol. 21 (2017), Iss. 1 : pp. 40–64
Published online: 2017-01
AMS Subject Headings: Global Science Press
Copyright: COPYRIGHT: © Global Science Press
Pages: 25
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Efficient linear, fully-decoupled and energy stable numerical scheme for a variable density and viscosity, volume-conserved, hydrodynamically coupled phase-field elastic bending energy model of lipid vesicles
Yang, Xiaofeng
Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Vol. 400 (2022), Iss. P.115479
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2022.115479 [Citations: 8]