Modeling of Blood and Dialysate Flow in Hollow-Fiber Hemodialyzers

One of the problems that mostly arises in kidney diseases, is abnormal reduction of fluid removal in the body, which increases the level of acids and increase normal range of molecules such as urea, glucose, creatinine, beta 2 –micro globulin and complement factor D. Due to the availability of technologies to produce membranes and fibers, it is possible to remove these toxins by producing membrane sets, such as dialysis. The heart of a dialysis is dialyzer that filters toxins and extra water of the body through its hollow fiber membranes. In this regard, a model is needed to investigate and optimize process of toxin clearance, in order to reduce manufacturing costs and increase efficiency of dialysis. Since process parameters and dialysis structure determines elimination level and also the stay of useful molecules in blood, manufacturing design is of great importance. In this paper, a two-dimensional model of speed, pressure and flow concentration was prepared for both blood and dialysate phase, and discretized using finite difference method. Here, the simulation was carried out using MATLAB software. The present study investigated the effect of the change of various parameters, including blood and dialysate flow rate, length and radius of the fiber for F60 filter of Feresinus Company on the elimination level of the targeted toxins.

Keywords:

Dialysis , simulation , modeling , membrane fibers (hollow membrane fibers)