Abstract
In this study, CFD analysis was applied to evaluate the pressure drop and velocity distribution in an extracapillary membrane oxygenator. In most cases, the performance of the extracapillary membrane oxygenator depends on the blood flow conditions. In our previous study with flow visualization, it was indicated that the CFD flow pattern showed a flow condition that was similar to an actual oxygenator. In this study, we focused on pressure drop and velocity distribution with a CFD simulation value and compared those values with those of an in-vitro experiment. In our simulation, the pressure drop increased with the increase of flow rate. During a lower flow rate, both the experimental value and the simulated pressure drop showed almost the same tendency. However, during a higher flow rate condition, the pressure drop of the simulation was 10 mmHg smaller than that of the experimental value. In the case of velocity distribution, we observed an area of stagnation that seems to have been correlated with a thrombus formation area. Therefore, we highly recommended CFD simulation as an effective method of optimizing the design of an artificial lung.
