Simulation of Oxygen Distribution in a Scaffold with Microfluidic Channels for Tissue Engineering

Despite the advancements made in the tissue engineering, one of the obstacles in producing thick tissues is the means of oxygen transport to the deep layered cells of the engineered tissue and creating the network of veins inside the tissue. One way to overcome this problem is to create a microfluidic network of channels inside the porous scaffold. These channels can both enhance the oxygenation and produce a mold for the natural vessels created by the angiogenesis cells. In this paper the dissolved oxygen distribution inside a 2D scaffold, which contains bifurcation based microfluidic channels, has been simulated by the means of computational fluid dynamics. To achieve this, the liquid flow and oxygen transport equations have been solved with considerations to the boundary conditions and suitable parameters. The oxygen transport has been found for the static scaffold, and the scaffolds made from the 0 order to third order of bifurcation with a bifurcation angle of 45 degrees. The results have shown that the scaffold with the second order of bifurcation has a better oxygen distribution and also more free area for the cell proliferation, which is consistent with the references. Next, the bifurcation angle was reduced to 35 degrees for the second order scaffold which resulted in an increase in the non-hypoxic area. Generally, by designing optimized angle of bifurcation based channels, a significant area can be oxygenated, while there will be sufficient surface available for cell proliferations.