Design of a performance test loop for an artificial heart pump
Liu, Yingjie, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia
Allaire, Paul E., Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia
Wood, III, Houston G., Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia
Olsen, D. B., Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia
Heart disease is by far the leading cause of death in the United States. A mechanical circulatory pump (Left Ventricular Assist Device - LVAD) is sometimes used to aid the failing left ventricle in patients with end-stage congestive heart failure (CHF) by supplying additional flow in parallel with the native heart. The University of Virginia and the Utah Artificial Heart Institute have cooperatively designed a new magnetically levitated LVAD. A mock circulatory loop, which simulates the human circulatory system, is needed to bench test the various versions of the pump. This thesis describes the design, construction and initial testing of this mock circulatory loop using water or a blood analog fluid. The loop consists of a cardiac simulator, air/water tanks to model the venous and arterial compliance, tygon tubes to model the venous, arterial and other system flow resistances, and a tuning clamp to allow for changes in system characteristics under different cardiac pressure/flow conditions.
Mechanical system design equations were developed to determine the operating parameters such as compliance, resistance and fluid volume. Electrical analog systems were then implemented to aid with the simulation of the mock loop performance in modeling the human cardiovascular system. Several physical loop measurements were carried out modeling a healthy person in sleep, rest, and physical activity and compared to other simulations found in the literature. The mock circulatory loop system was then modified to include the LVAD when operated at several different rotational speeds in CHF patients. The results of physical measurement in an example pump in different simulated conditions were analyzed. The loop is now ready for testing the future artificial heart pumps.
Note: Abstract extracted from PDF file via OCR.
MS (Master of Science)
heart disease, mechanical circulatory pumps
Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.
Thesis originally deposited on 2016-03-17 in version 1.28 of Libra. This thesis was migrated to Libra2 on 2017-03-23 16:36:34.
English
All rights reserved (no additional license for public reuse)
2003/01/01
