extracorporeal life support

The design of modern bearingless blood pumps requires detailed insights of the occurring shear forces within the pump in order to reduce blood damage. As the optimization by means of experimental shear-force analysis is often impractical, this work presents a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation framework, based on Eulerian hemolysis models, to identify the sources of blood damage in bearingless centrifugal pumps. The outputs obtained with this framework are compared to experimental hemolysis tests conducted with ten different pump prototypes. As a result, this work provides design guidelines for improving the cell compatibility of future centrifugal blood pumps. read more