Effects of non-newtonian properties of blood flow on magnetic nanoparticle targeted drug delivery

Abstract

Objective(s): One applications of nanotechnology is in the area of medicine which is called nanomedicine. Primary instruments in nanomedicine can help us to detect diseases and used for drug delivery to inaccessible areas of human tissues. An important issue in simulating the motion of nanoparticles is modeling blood flow as a Newtonian or non-Newtonian fluid. Sometimes blood flow is simulated as a Newtonian fluid but actually blood has nature of non-Newtonian fluid. Simulation of targeted drug delivery and motion of nanoparticles in the blood flow as Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid flow is investigated in this paper<br />Materials and Methods: In this paper, the blood flow is modeled as both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid and the effects of each case on the motion of nanoparticles in blood flow and targeted drug delivery is investigated. The flow is modeled with finite volume method. The particle modeled with discrete phase model.<br />Results: Cross, Herschel-Bulkley and Power-law models are used for simulating the non-Newtonian blood flow. Numerical simulations show that trajectory of nanoparticle's movement and the required time to pass the vessel by blood flow is variable for different models. According to obtained results, non-Newtonian Power-law and Herschel-Bulkley models have closely similar results but they have significant differences compared with Newtonian model. <br />Conclusion: According to the results, it is preferred in the simulation to model blood flow as a non-Newtonian fluid and uses one of Herschel- Bulkley or Power-law models. Otherwise the simulation is far different from real phenomena.