Large-eddy simulation of the FDA benchmark blood pump: validation against experiments and implications for turbulent flow mechanisms

TL;DR

This paper validates large-eddy simulation (LES) for blood pump flow against experiments, showing LES's superior accuracy over RANS methods in turbulence-rich regions, and offers guidance for future high-fidelity studies.

Contribution

It demonstrates the effectiveness of LES with transient rotor-stator coupling in accurately capturing turbulent blood pump flows, outperforming traditional RANS approaches.

Findings

LES with transient coupling matches experimental data better than RANS.

Mesh resolution of ~80 million cells is needed for well-resolved LES.

LES reveals detailed vortex structures and turbulence characteristics.

Abstract

This study presents a systematic validation and comparative assessment of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) strategies for centrifugal blood pump simulations using the U.S. Food and Drug Administration benchmark model. A scale-resolving large eddy simulation (LES) with transient sliding-interface (SI) coupling is evaluated and compared against Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approaches employing both multiple reference frame and SI formulations. Numerical predictions are validated through direct comparison with particle image velocimetry measurements under two representative operating conditions. The results indicate that LES with transient rotor-stator coupling achieves consistently improved agreement with experimental velocity fields compared with RANS-based methods, particularly in the diffuser region where strong intermittency and wall-bounded turbulence are present. In contrast, RANS-based approaches exhibit noticeable discrepancies in these regions. A mesh sensitivity study and an assessment of temporal averaging effects are conducted for LES. The quality of the LES results is further quantified using three complementary metrics, demonstrating that a mesh resolution of approximately 80 million cells achieves a well-resolved LES regime. Building on the validated scale-resolving simulations, detailed analyses of vortical structures, turbulent kinetic energy distributions, and velocity energy spectra are performed to characterize the internal flow physics of the pump. This study demonstrates that scale-resolving, transient simulation approaches are essential for accurately capturing the highly unsteady, turbulence-dominated flow features in ventricular assist devices and provides practical guidance for future high-fidelity hemodynamic and hemocompatibility studies.