Modeling of Circular Mass Transport of Nutrients in Capillary Vessels Using Microfluidic Approach

Abstract

This paper presents a novel reduced order model (ROM), which is applicable to describe the capillary-intercellular space mass-transfer. The model contains the red blood cell (RBC) induced microcirculatory flow. The blood hydrodynamic behavior in capillary vessels can be modeled as a two phase flow, where the phases are the RBC and the plasma. In this flow regime characterized by a low Reynolds number the phases are horizontally alternating and moving along the capillary, so it is similar a the two-phase droplet-flow.Due to the microcirculation in the two-phase flow higher masstransfer rates are experienced than in normal laminar flow. In this paper we demonstrate the effect of the microcirculation through the examples of oxygen and LDL transfer, calculated with and without considering the microcirculation in the model. The benefit of using the ROMis the high speed of simulation: by applying our model : the execution time for the same problem is reduced by two orders of magnitude compared to the execution time needed by a detailed CFD model.Keywordscapillary vesselmass-transfermodeling