High-Resolution Hemodynamic Analysis of a Wearable Oxygenator Using High-Performance Computing

Abstract In this paper, we study the hydrodynamics of a wearable oxygenator using computational fluid dynamics on a supercomputer. In this computation, the fiber bundle of the oxygenator is modeled by a porous medium model, and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with a K-ε turbulence model are used to model the flow in the channels. The blood flow velocity, pressure, and shear stress are carefully studied and the hemolysis index of the oxygenator NIH is calculated by using the fast three-dimensional numerical hemolysis approximation method, which is in the range 0.006 ~ 0.094 g/100L. The results show that the pressure loss of the wearable oxygenator mainly occurs in the fiber bundle area. The inlet, outlet, and channels have relatively high shear stress, which may damage the red blood cells. When the flow rate ranges from 2.0 L/min to 5.0 L/min, the estimated hemolysis meets the applicable range allowed by human physiology. In addition, the parallel performance is studied on a supercomputer, which shows that, for the simulation with over 9 million mesh cells, it scales up to 720 processors and the parallel efficiency is over 60%.