Comparison between Single-Phase Flow Simulation and Multiphase Flow Simulation of Patient-Specific Total Cavopulmonary Connection Structures Assisted by a Rotationally Symmetric Blood Pump

Abstract

To accurately assess the hemolysis risk of the ventricular assist device, this paper proposed a cell destruction model and the corresponding evaluation parameters based on multiphase flow. The single-phase flow and multiphase flow in two patient-specific total cavopulmonary connection structures assisted by a rotationally symmetric blood pump (pump-TCPC) were simulated. Then, single-phase and multiphase cell destruction models were used to evaluate the hemolysis risk. The results of both cell destruction models indicated that the hemolysis risk in the straight pump-TCPC model was lower than that in the curved pump-TCPC model. However, the average and maximum values of the multiphase flow blood damage index (mBDI) were smaller than those of the single-phase flow blood damage index (BDI), but the average and maximum values of the multiphase flow particle residence time (mPRT) were larger than those of the single-phase flow particle residence time (PRT). This study proved that the multiphase flow method can be used to simulate the mechanical behavior of red blood cells (RBCs) and white blood cells (WBCs) in a complex flow field and the multiphase flow cell destruction model had smaller estimates of the impact shear stress.

Keywords

• axial blood pump
• computational fluid dynamics
• hemolysis risk
• multiphase flow
• total cavopulmonary connection