A novel approach with non-uniform force allocation for area preservation in spring network models1)

One of the most important characteristics of red blood cells is their elasticity and ability to return to original biconcave shape after external forces stop acting on them. There are several conservation laws that together govern this return and one of them is the area conservation. In this paper, we focus on local area conservation and introduce a new way of modeling it using a spring network model. We take into account the current shape of the network triangles and find the proportional allocation of area conservation forces, which would for individual triangles preserve their shapes. Since the force contributions in each node are combined from all adjacent triangles, the final resulting shape might not be the same, but overall effect on the triangulations is positive in the sense that this approach tends to regularize them.