Simulation of oxygen and glucose transport in hollow fiber membrane bioreactor for growing artificial tissue

Recent experimental studies suggest that hollow fiber membrane bioreactors (HFMBs) may be used to grow tissues in the laboratory, which may then be implanted into patients to repair skeletal defects. It has become necessary to develop a theoretical framework that elucidates the quantitative relationships between the cell environment and tissue behavior in HFMBs in order to guide the design of effective bone tissue engineering protocols. At the scale of the laboratory device, the transport behavior is governed by non-linear coupled convection– diffusion and reaction processes. This paper presents an approach for simulating glucose and oxygen transport in HFMB for growing bone tissues where we use direct numerical simulation (finite element method) instead of more tedious applied mathematics theorems for modeling glucose and oxygen transport in HFMB. The numerical solutions of the governing model equations have been obtained using the software package COMSOL. The advantage of this approach is that it does not rely on the determination of averaged transport properties (e.g., diffusion coefficient) that appear in averaged transport equations which are often difficult to measure experimentally or may not have significant physical meaning. The developed framework is then employed to carry out a systematic analysis of the influence of various process parameters of HFMB (e.g., fluid velocity, cell density, etc.) on the glucose and oxygen transport behavior. It is envisaged that the developed multiscale tool will provide better understanding of the functioning of HFMB for the purposes discussed above.

کلیدواژه ها:

Bone tissue ، Hollow fiber membrane bioreactor ، Mathematical simulation