Engineering Commons^™

Mimicking Blood Rheology For More Accurate Modeling In Benchtop Research, Lindsey Webb

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Because blood is challenging to use as a working fluid in a laboratory setting due to health and safety concerns, a blood analogue would be useful to perform benchtop experiments. Viscosity is an important fluid property for modeling and experiments, especially because blood is a shear thinning fluid; therefore, it has a decreasing viscosity with higher shear rates. This project seeks to create a blood-mimicking fluid for benchtop laboratory use. Numerous fluids with different combinations of water, glycerin, salt, and xanthan gum (XG) were created to mimic blood viscosity at different hematocrit levels. Four additional solutions were also created from …