A theoretical study of the influence of diffusion and chemical reaction velocity on the rate of exchange of carbon monoxide and oxygen between the red blood corpuscle and the surrounding fluid

Abstract Numerical methods have been applied to the problem of the diffusion of CO and O2 through the red blood corpuscle membrane, accompanied by diffusion and chemical reaction of these substances in the layer of concentrated haemoglobin solution inside the corpuscle. The methods are applied to recent data on (i) the rates of CO uptake by corpuscle suspensions and haemoglobin solutions, prepared from the blood of rams and pregnant ewes, (ii) the rates of O2egress from ram corpuscle suspensions and haemoglobin solutions. In the case of the ram blood the slower overall rates of exchange in the corpuscle suspensions, as compared with the haemoglobin solution, can be accounted for by the limiting effect of diffusion inside the corpuscle, without the necessity of attributing any limiting effect to the corpuscle membrane. In the pregnant ewe blood, on the other hand, the corpuscle membrane appears to have a definite limiting effect on the passage of CO and preliminary values of its permeability to this substance are given. It is also shown how the special methods, of computation developed in this paper can be generalized and thus made applicable to other processes in which diffusion and chemical reaction velocity are jointly involved.