Plasma mixing is likely to affect capillary oxygen transport in hard working rat heart.

Abstract

The delivery of oxygen to tissue occurs primarily in the capillaries. Therefore a substantial part of the research on oxygen transport into the tissue has been directed towards oxygen release and transport in and around capillaries. The influence of the major determinants on this transport, such as diffusion coefficient, blood flow, reaction kinetics, has been well investigated. One of the possible influences on the oxygen transport in the capillaries was, seemingly, eliminated by Aroesty and Gross (1970). They investigated the effect of plasma mixing on oxygen transport in capillaries and showed that the net effect of mixing was negligible. The enhancement near the red blood cell (RBC) downstream of a small plasma volume was cancelled out near the upstream RBC. However, in a previous model (Bos et al., in press) we showed that the results of their study were influenced considerably by their choice of boundary conditions. In fact, one could easily show a 50% increase of the oxygen flux through the plasma to the tissue by altering the boundary conditions.KeywordsForced ConvectionOxygen TransportBoundary ConcentrationOxygen FluxKrogh CylinderThese 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.