At Lifeblood we want to make sure we get the most out of every donation to help as many people as possible. That’s why we process blood donations to make different components. For example, one whole blood donation can be manufactured into separate red cell, platelet and plasma products.
A centrifuge is a special machine that spins things around very fast. Imagine spinning a bucket of water on a rope; the water pushes outwards. A centrifuge does something similar, but much more powerfully. It uses a force called centrifugal force to separate different parts of a mixture.
Learn about the processes of filtration, sieving and centrifuging, and how the size and mass of particles relate to separation techniques. 2:04 describes centrifuging.
Procedure of setting a blood separating centrifuge to separate heavy blood components from lighter components.
Centrifugation is a process used in blood banks to separate the different components of blood, which is a colloidal solution containing red and white blood cells, platelets, and plasma. Since these particles are too small to be separated by filtration, a centrifuge machine spins test tubes of blood at high speed. This creates centripetal acceleration, causing the heavier red blood cells to move outward, the lighter white blood cells and platelets to form a middle layer, and the lightest component, plasma, to remain at the top. In this way, centrifugation efficiently separates the components of blood for testing and medical use.
A centrifuge is simply a machine that spins around to make a large and useful force. Small centrifuges are used in scientific laboratories (for example, to separate blood products). You can find much bigger ones in aerospace-labs, where they're used for testing astronauts, pilots, and their equipment to absolute breaking point.
Donated fresh blood is separated into 3 parts for medical use:
This separation is done through a simple process called centrifugation, which spins the blood to separate it into these parts. Red blood cells and platelets are also filtered to remove white blood cells.