Metabolite Transport Inside Channeled Porous Scaffolds for Haematopoietic Stem Cell Culture: A Computational Study

Porous polymeric materials play a key role in regenerative medicine, serving as three-dimensional scaffolds for cell culture. Hence, the definition of their micro-architecture should be regarded as a pivotal design issue, that has to be wittingly addressed while engineering a cell culture system. Computational fluid dynamics techniques (CFD) appear to be very valuable in this respect, since they have been appreciably applied in recent literature as a means to analyze fluid dynamics and mass transport inside scaffold or bioreactor models [1]; moreover, leading researchers in tissue engineering have acknowledged the role of numerical methodology in the issue of defining optimal flow conditions for three-dimensional dynamic culture systems.Copyright © 2008 by ASME