Effects of the Design of a Rotary Blood Pump on Hemocompatibility

The paper shows how hemocompatibility is affected by changes in the geometry of the flow part of a rotary blood pump (RBP) for supporting patients in the terminal stage of heart failure. Numerical simulation made it possible to obtain a family of head–flow curves for six geometrical RBP models differing in terms of the geometry of the impeller blade and the distance from the impeller to the diffusor. The effects of changes in geometry on the volume in which shear stresses are elevated were evaluated at the working point of 4.5 L/min at 80 mm Hg. The values for the minimum, maximum, and average residence times of blood particles in the pump domain were obtained. Numerical simulation of the flow was run in the Fluent ANSYS 19.0 software.