Assessment of mass transfer efficiency in a hemodialyzer

Patients suffering from renal failure need a renal replacement therapy like hemodialysis sessions of four hours three times a week. The patient’s blood is then drained and purified in an extracorporeal circuit using a hemodialyzer. In this dialyzer, blood and dialysate flow counter currently on each side of a porous membrane. Concentration and pressure differences in both fluid compartments are the driving forces for transport processes like diffusion and ultrafiltration. To have better insight in this blood purification modality, blood, dialysate and ultrafiltration flows were investigated. Therefore, three dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) combined with experimental validation were applied to investigate flow and transport distribution on micro and macro scale.