2007/09/05 by Lin Ma, William S. Klug
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Lipid Membrane Structure and Behavior #Nanopore and Nanochannel Transport Studies #RNA Interference and Gene Delivery #physics.bio-ph #physics.comp-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.jcp.2008.02.019
arxiv created 2007/09/05 · openalex publication_date 2008/03/03 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As two-dimensional fluid shells, lipid bilayer membranes resist bending and stretching but are unable to sustain shear stresses. This property gives membranes the ability to adopt dramatic shape changes. In this paper, a finite element model is developed to study static equilibrium mechanics of membranes. In particular, a viscous regularization method is proposed to stabilize tangential mesh deformations and improve the convergence rate of nonlinear solvers. The Augmented Lagrangian method is used to enforce global constraints on area and volume during membrane deformations. As a validation of the method, equilibrium shapes for a shape-phase diagram of lipid bilayer vesicle are calculated. These numerical techniques are also shown to be useful for simulations of three-dimensional large-deformation problems: the formation of tethers (long tube-like exetensions); and Ginzburg-Landau phase separation of a two-lipid-component vesicle. To deal with the large mesh distortions of the two-phase model, modification of vicous regularization is explored to achieve r-adaptive mesh optimization.