A numerical simulation of heartassist5 blood pump using an advanced turbulence model

The need for mechanical assistance of the failing heart has increased with improvements in medicine and a rapidly aging population. In recent decades, significant progress has been made in the development and refinement of ventricular assist devices (VADs). Such devices operate in mixed laminar, transitional, and turbulent flow regime. One tool that assists in the development of VADs by facilitating understanding of the physical and mechanical properties of these flow regimes is computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In our investigation, we tested an advanced turbulence model that is a further development from standard Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models. From estimated pump flow rates (Q₀) and constant rotation speed (n), pressure head (Δp) was calculated and validated with experimental data. An advanced turbulence model called scale adaptive simulation (SAS) was used in the solving of six different working cases comparing numerical SAS-SST and standard SST-kω models to experimental results.