Phenomenological characterization of blood ’s intermediate shear rate: a new concept for hemorheology

In this study, the intermediate shear rate is introduced and defined when the effect of aggregation on the change of blood viscosity is diminished; and afterwards, the alteration in the blood viscosity is dominantly affected by the deformation of RBCs. With this respect, modeling the effective parameters on the blood shear-thinning behavior including hematocrit and plasma viscosity was performed for the two different shear regions discriminated by the proposed intermediate shear rates. The presented rheological model reflects a phenomenological approach to assess the human blood viscosity with an average error of ± 5% compared to experimental data for hematocrits between 0.299 and 0.702, subjected to various shear rates from 0.2 to 680 1/s. The temperature changes as well as biochemical effects on whole blood viscosity are characterized by the introduced plasma viscosity-dependent model. The presented com prehensive model could be used for better understanding of blood flow hemodynamics and analyzing the shear dependence of aggregation and deformability behaviors of RBCs.
Source: Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine - Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research