CFD-Based Radial Thrust and Hemocompatibility Study of the Double-Volute Artificial Heart Pump

The third-generation magnetically levitated artificial heart pump uses magnetic force to achieve complete levitation of the rotor. In practice, artificial heart pump often works at the off-design operating conditions of centrifugal pumps, which will result in large radial thrust and fluctuations of radial thrust on the impeller rotor, this will seriously affect the stability of rotor levitation and hemocompatibility. There-fore, in this paper, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to calculate the flow field of a double-volute artificial heart pump to investigate the advantages and disad-vantages of the double-volute casing. First, a 3D model of the flow passage compo-nents of an artificial heart pump is established; second, the advantages of the double-volute casing in terms of radial thrust optimization are investigated by applying CFD methods; finally, the effects of the double-volute casing on the pumping perfor-mance and hemocompatibility are discussed. The results show that the double-volute casing has significant advantages in the optimization of radial thrust and radial thrust fluctuations, and has a slightly negative impact on the pumping performance and hemocompatibility, but it is within acceptable limits.