Numerical analysis of FDA blood pump

The FDA blood pump is a centrifugal pump with a rotor diameter of 52 mm and four rounded blades 3 mm high and 3 mm wide. The diameter D of the inlet section and outlet section of the FDA blood pump is 12 mm. As shown in Figure 1a, the FDA blood pump model was set as Model 1, the position of the inlet was inlet-1, and the length L₁ of the inlet was 336 mm, i.e., 28D. To study the influence of inlet position, we truncated the inlet section of the FDA blood pump model and set it as Model 2 (as shown in Figure 1b). Its cut-off position was inlet-2, and the length L₂ of the remaining was 36 mm, i.e., 3D. The red dotted line in the figure was the center line from the position plane of inlet (i.e., inlet-1 and inlet-2) to the top plane of the guide-cone, indicating the length of the inlet section of Model 1 and Model 2, which were 28D and 3D respectively. Model 1 and Model 2 represented the extracorporeal blood pump with external loop pipe and the intracorporal blood pump directly connected to the end of the heart respectively. We extended the outlet section of the two models to 203.5 mm to ensure full blood development. Because of the adverse pressure gradient in the diffuser, the position of “Line-d” (see Figure 1c) is likely to cause flow phenomena such as flow separation and transition. Therefore, the flow here is sensitive to the numerical schemes and turbulence models, and can test the capability of numerical schemes in particular.
PIV tests of the FDA blood pump were carried out [10 (link),11 (link)]. The average velocity distributions and pressure heads were tested for six operating conditions, including flow rates from 2.5 L/min to 7 L/min and rotational speeds from 2500 rpm to 3500 rpm. The experimental velocity was taken from 45° of the first quadrant of the impeller and from the line-d of the diffuser in a plane with Z = 6.8 mm (as shown in Figure 1c). The CFD data mentioned in the subsequent results section were also extracted from these lines and compared with the experimental results.