Hemodynamic investigation on blood flow in a rugged microchannel

The biological flow characteristics inside a rugged surface type microchannel are investigated experimentally using a micro-particle image velocimetry (micro-PIV) method. The main objectives of this study are to understand the blood flow structure inside a micro-domain blood vessel and to identify the feasibility of nano-scale fluorescent particles for velocity field measurement in a micron-sized channel. The flow field is analyzed with a spatial resolution of 1K×1K pixels at low Reynolds number flow. To obtain the spatial distributions of mean velocity, 100 instantaneous velocity fields are captured and ensemble-averaged. As a result, for the case of blood flow, there are substantial cell deformation and variations to pass through the rugged surface of a microchannel and the clear velocity vector field was acquired by using the present micro-PIV technique.