Sensing the blood cell damage in a magnetically actuated circular pump

Recently we developed a magnetically driven pumping system with two spherical NdFeB plugs in a circular housing. The gap between the plugs and the channel wall is influencing the blood cell damage as well as the pump performance. We are using a computational and experimental sensor platform to analyze the stress on the blood cells in the device. The sensor platform can be used to reduce cell activation and/or hemolysis by optimizing the leakage between the spherical plugs and the housing. Hemolysis measurements show the first result of occurring stress inside the pumping device with a given gap of 0.2 mm between the pumping plug and the channel wall. The experiments are in good agreement with the results from the computational stress analysis.