Overview of the Original Sangria Project

The goals of the Sangria Project are to develop and apply advanced parallel geometric and numerical algorithms and software for simulating complex flows with dynamic interfaces. The development of scalable, parallel high-accuracy algorithms for simulating such flows poses enormous challenges, particularly on systems with thousands of processors.

Our target application is modeling the flow of blood, which is a mixture of interacting gel-filled solid cells and fluid plasma. Current blood flow models are macroscopic, treating the mixture as a homogeneous continuum. Microstructural models resolve individual cell deformations and motion, and their interactions with the surrounding fluid plasma. Because of the computational difficulties of resolving tens of thousands of dynamically deforming cellular interfaces, no one to date has simulated realistic blood flows at the microstructural level. Yet such simulations are necessary in order to gain a better understanding of blood damage, which is central to improved artificial organ design, and for the development of more rational macroscopic blood models.

The Sangria Project team brings together applied mathematicians, biochemists, bioengineers, computational fluid dynamicists, computer scientists, continuum mechanicists, hemorheologists, numerical analysts, and transplant surgeons at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the University of Washington. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation's Information Technology Research program, under grant ACI-0086093.

Read the project synopsis here...