• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.21 no.3 s.61
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• pp.311-320
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• 2000

In this paper a newly designed oxygenator module was used to perform the experiments for pressure drop and oxygen transport in order to evaluate the efficiency of the artificial lung. Also, distilled water. sodium sulfite solutions used in this experiment were evaluated for the performance of other artificial lungs. Substituted bloods have many advantages over whole blood in studying pressure drop and oxygen uptake. They are relatively inexpensive, and require fewer variables to be controlled. Furthermore, deoxygenation is not necessary when those solutions are used. In addition to these advantages. assays and interpretation of the experimental results are relatively easy. In the case of using the sodium sulfite solution having the same oxygen partial pressure as whole blood. the oxygen transfer rate of the sodium sulfite solution was basically same as that of whole blood. It was concluded in evaluating the function of artificial lungs that the sodium sulfite solution was suited for measuring oxygen transfer rate. In our module, artificial blood was flowed into the outside of hollow fiber membrane. The artificial lung created in this experiment showed that pressure drop was reduced to $1/3\~1/6$ of that compared to the inside-flow case.