Oxygen uptake into the sheared flowing blood: effects of red cell membranes and haematocrit.

Abstract

The non-Newtonian behaviour of blood, due to its fluid droplet like behaviour and deformability of red blood cells (RBC), is responsible for its variable rheological properties under different flow conditions. This has been an object of intensive investigations such as blood viscometry and filtration as well as single cell deformation measurements etc. Inspite of this, only a few reports deal with oxygen transport of blood under shearing. It is to be expected that fluid-drop-like behaviour of RBC’s in analogy to deformed suspended liquid droplets (Schmid-Schönbein et al., 1981; Torza et al., 1972) influences mass transport operation. Moreover, secondary flow (in addition to main flow) is known to enhance the mass transport in a homogenous liquid. Therefore, two different phenomena are considered here to improve gas exchange of flowing blood: 1. The intracellular convection within RBC e.g. due to their deformability properties and rotation of red cell membrane around the cell interior as proposed (Fischer and Schmid-Schönbein, 1977). 2. Secondary flow within flowing whole blood, occurring e.g. in vessel branches (Karino et al., 1979). KeywordsShear RateOxygen UptakeSecondary FlowHigh Shear RateBlood Flow RateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.