抄録
An oxygenator substitutes the gas transfer function of natural lungs. An extra-capillary flow oxygenator consists of over several thousands of hollow fiber membranes with outer-diameter less 300 micrometer. The gas transfer in an oxygenator involves complicate blood flow outer hollow fibers and nonlinear chemical reactions of O_2 and CO_2 in blood layer. We have been devising a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, which calculated transfer sources through gas-membrane-blood layers and blood-gas reaction sources incorporated in governing equations of mass convective diffusion and dealt both gas layer and blood layer simultaneously. In this study, we investigated distributions of O_2 and CO_2 concentrations by calculating a segment model of a referred oxygenator. One of the results of blood outlet surface showed that O_2 concentration decreased from 587.8 to 487.2 mmHg, CO_2 concentration increased from 4.5 to 33.0 mmHg in direction of gas flow. These results suggested that our CFD method could estimate the gas transfers to be influenced by concentration changes in the gas layer.
