Channel Rotor Calculation for a Centrifugal Blood Pump

摘要

The main requirement for newly developed blood pumps is to provide the head-capacity curve specified by the design specifications. Analysis of literature on 3D computational flow dynamics (CFD) in centrifugal pumps [1-3] revealed disadvantages of the simplified approach to simulation of flow hydrodynamics inside the pump. In these works, primary attention is paid to details of computational grid construction. The number of layers is increased, which leads to a superfluous increase in requirements for the computational power. Nevertheless, as shown in [4-6], an increase in the computation precision does allow errors to be avoided. In addition, the turbulence models used in CFD simulation are not perfect. Available tools for machine processing of pumps do not allow the 3D model to be implemented with the same degree of precision as determined by the computational grid. In this work, the flow hydrodynamics inside the pump was software simulated on the macro level. This allowed sufficient accuracy of performance simulation to be achieved using minimal computer resources. In vitro and animal tests remain the main methods for assessing the efficacy of the developed pumps.