(277e) Application of a New Computational Fluid Dynamics Model to Predict Turbulent Flow Damage for the US FDA Critical Path Initiative Centrifugal Blood Pump

Mesude Ozturk^a, Edgar A. O’Rear^b,c and Dimitrios V. Papavassiliou^b

^aDepartment of Chemical Engineering, Cumhuriyet University, Sivas, TURKEY

^bDepartment of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

^cInstitute for Biomedical Engineering, Science and Technology, Norman, OK, USA

Blood constitutes about 8% of an average adult’s body weight and its role is to transport material to and from tissue, prevent fluid loss, and defend the body. These functions are supported by a variety of blood cells including red blood cells (erythrocytes), white blood cells, and platelets. Red blood cells circulate in bloodstream for approximately 120 days before being removed mechanically or biologically. However, the normal life span of blood components can be shortened by prosthetic heart devices, which cause non-physiological conditions, such as turbulent blood flow. Turbulent blood flow in artificial hearts and ventricular assist devices (VAD) cause hemolysis as well as sublethal red blood cell (RBC) damage, a major concern when designing prosthetic heart devices. In this work, the flow field through a centrifugal blood pump that has been identified as a case study through the Critical Path Initiative of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) [1] was simulated under their specified conditions of operation and the effect of turbulence on RBC damage was investigated. Hemolysis was predicted using a validated computational model [2], which uses the Kolmogorov length scale (KLS) as an indicator of the degree of turbulence. Predictions are also to be compared to the other experimental findings for a centrifugal blood pump.

References

[1] US Food and Drug Administration, 2013, "Computational fluid dynamics: an FDA Critical Path Initiative project," https://fdacfd.nci.nih.gov.

[2] Ozturk, M., D.V. Papavassiliou, and E.A. O'Rear, An approach for assessing turbulent flow damage to blood in medical devices. Journal of Biomechanical Engineering, 2016. 139(1): p. 011008-011008-8.