No Cover Image

Journal article 740 views 161 downloads

A multiscale computational fluid dynamics approach to simulate the micro-fluidic environment within a tissue engineering scaffold with highly irregular pore geometry

Feihu Zhao Orcid Logo, Johanna Melke, Keita Ito, Bert van Rietbergen, Sandra Hofmann

Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology, Volume: 18

Swansea University Author: Feihu Zhao Orcid Logo

  • Zhaoetal2019BMMB.pdf

    PDF | Version of Record

    This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

    Download (3.15MB)

Abstract

Mechanical stimulation can regulate cellular behavior, e.g., differentiation, proliferation, matrix production and mineralisation. To apply fluid-induced wall shear stress (WSS) on cells, perfusion bioreactors have been commonly used in tissue engineering experiments. To gain a better insight into t...

Full description

Published in: Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology
ISSN: 1617-7959 1617-7940
Published: 2019
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa51679
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Abstract: Mechanical stimulation can regulate cellular behavior, e.g., differentiation, proliferation, matrix production and mineralisation. To apply fluid-induced wall shear stress (WSS) on cells, perfusion bioreactors have been commonly used in tissue engineering experiments. To gain a better insight into the actual mechanical stimulation on cells in a tissue engineering experiment, computational simulation of the fluidic environment within scaffolds is important. However, biomaterial scaffolds typically have extremely complex geometries. This implies high computational costs for simulating the precise fluidic environment within the scaffolds. In this study, we propose a low-computational cost and feasible technique for quantifying the micro-fluidic environment within the scaffolds, which have extremely complex (or highly irregular) geometries. This technique is based on a multiscale computational fluid dynamics approach. The validation results have demonstrated that this approach can capture the WSS distribution in most regions within the scaffold. Importantly, the central process unit time needed to run the model is considerably low.
Keywords: Multiscale model, computational fluid dynamics, wall shear stress, homogenization, tissue engineering scaffold