A clear vision for the healthcare industry

By Marc Horner and Ahmad Haidari, Fluent Inc.

The healthcare industry is facing a dynamic future with many challenges stemming from an expanding elderly population in the developed world, higher levels of care, and a constant push for new, more effective pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceuticals. From the discovery, manufacturing, and delivery of new drugs to biomedical device design and disease research, CFD is a key tool that will be at the forefront of this growing industry.

Fluent has been providing biomedical modelling solutions for over a decade. It has a dedicated and knowledgeable staff, and has academic and industrial partners to meet the needs of many far-reaching applications.

For the pharmaceutical and medical products industries, the many capabilities in Fluent software offer solutions for both drug manufacturing and drug delivery. FLUENT is used in applications such as spray dryers, scale-up, mixing, and chemical reaction. Devices such as inhalers, blood pumps, artificial heart valves, stents, and catheters have been successfully modeled with FLUENT and FIDAP to better understand their performance and interaction with the human body.

FIDAP’s fluid-structure interaction (FSI) model has been widely used to capture the deformation of physiologic structures as a result of air, liquid, or blood flow. POLYFLOW is ideal for extrusion, blow molding, and thermoforming, processes that often involve viscoelastic materials, and which are used for the manufacture of pharmaceutical packaging and medical devices.

Bioengineering has experienced rapid growth in recent years, thanks to the ability to create 3D meshes from MRI and CT scan data of blood vessels, the digestive tract, or air passageways. Simulations of these systems are geared towards understanding the underlying causes of disease or analysing device performance. The import of medical scan data into GAMBIT has been assisted by recently developed filters, and through partnerships with industry leaders who specialise in this capability.

Microfluidic applications are at the forefront of many industries, including healthcare. In the biomedical area, so-called “lab-on-a-chip” applications include chemical/biological agent detection, DNA sequencing/analysis, and drug discovery. The various analytical tasks are performed in a series of microchannels whose characteristic width and height are between 10 and 1000 mm. Two critical applications for this type of analysis are the separation (isolation) and detection of a target species. Both processes rely on differences in the mobility, or migration speed of the species when subjected to an applied electric field. The electrohydrodynamics (EHD) modeling capability in FIDAP has been successfully used to predict the separation and pre-concentration of chemical species in this manner.

The geometry of the eye (left), including the sclera (black), iris (blue), cornea (gray), lens (pink), and choroid and ciliary body (red). A continuous, room temperature air stream cools the cornea surface for 30 seconds. After the air stream is stopped, the cornea warms up again. Natural convection currents develop in the anterior chamber, and these are illustrated by contours of velocity magnitude (right). By studying the rate at which the eye warms up, researchers can determine the rate of blood flow to the eye through the choroid and ciliary body. Courtesy of Dr. S. Orgül, Augenklinik Basel, Switzerland

Velocity magnitude displayed on a number of slice planes through the nasal cavity; the nostrils are at the lower left.