A Novel Approach for Compensating the Significance of Tubule’s Architecture in Urine Concentrating Mechanism of Renal Medulla

Abstract

Many theories and mathematical simulations have been proposed concerning urine concentrating mechanism (UCM). The WKM and region approach are the two most valuable methods for compensating the effect of tubule’s architecture in renal medulla. They both have tried to simulate tubule’s confinement within a particular region mathematically in one spatial dimension. In this study, continuity, momentum and species transport equations along with standard expressions for transtubular solutes and water transports on tubule’s membrane were solved numerically in three spatial dimensions which practically is the main significance of our novel approach. Model structure has been chosen as simple as possible to minimize the effect of other factors in tubule’s solute and water exchange. It has been tried to simulate the preferential interaction between tubules by introducing different diffusion coefficients for solutes in the intermediate media in order that changing this physical parameter directly could influence tubule’s confinement with respect to each other. The results have been discussed in detail and then the effect of solute’s diffusivity on UCM has been investigated subsequently. In overall, it has been found out that this simulation can validate the integrity of our proposed approach for further investigation in this field.