Numerical Flow Simulation in FDA's "Critical Path" benchmark blood pump

Master's Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Engineering - Mechanical Engineering, grade: 1.3, University of Rostock, course: Computational Science and Engineering, language: English, abstract: The work focuses on the analysis of the flow fields in the FDA's "Critical Path" benchmark blood pump. The CAD model of the pump is an opensource material, so the thesis works started with the mesh generation. A block-structured hexahedral mesh has been created using ANSYS ICEM CFD 15.0. An unsteady (URANS) incompressible blood flow simulation has been performed using k-_ SST turbulence model, with one of the operating conditions prescribed by the experimental literature. The simulations were performed using ANSYS CFX 19.1 solver. The validated results for the flow field show promising results in the blade passage region and the diffuser regions but the pressure head obtained has some discrepancies which were analyzed and justified. In addition, a study on hemolysis prediction using Power Law was performed, and the blood damage values of the benchmark blood pump were calculated for the stress-based model in the Eulerian approach.

The role of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in the biomedical field has increased a lot in recent years. The problems related to biocompatibility in medical and biological industries capture the attention of CFD engineers. One such biocompatible device is a Ventricular Assist Device (VAD). The development phase of VAD's associates CFD to make it more robust. VADs generally incorporated with blood pumps, so it is essential to examine the dynamics of the blood flow in the pump and also to analyze the damages concerned with the blood cells.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)and the Center of Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) have sponsored certain CFD"round-robins" to validate the efficiency of computer simulations in biomedical applications. The 'Computational round-robin #2' concerns with a "Critical Path" benchmark blood Pump.