My Doctoral Thesis : Development of a Muscle Powered Blood Pump

You can also get the these from the GLASGOW DSpace SERVICE at: Development of a muscle powered blood pump : fluid mechanic considerations

Comments

This was a really fun PhD to do. I was asked to investigate the fluid flow within a proto-type muscle powered blood pump. I had to build proto-types from scratch then analyse the fluid flow within each design. Fluid flow is important in a blood pump as you want as little damage as possible to be caused to blood passing through the pump.

Recommendation for Future Work

Use a flat sausage shape geometry with a valve at either end. That way you can pretty much gaurantee that blood will be flushed out of the artifical pumping chamber within a pumping cycle or two. Basically it is unlikely that the fluid flow within the device will cause damage, and there are some more important issues to sort out to obtain a working and useful muscle powered blood pump.
More important issues to deal with are:

• muscle - can the proposed skeletal muscle work with this device? Characterise the force generation of a conditioned skeletal muscle the use something like a linear actuator and force transducer with feedback from the force transducer.
• materials - choose a nice bio-compatible polyurethane
• construction - work out how to build the thing. If a flat sausage were used then it would probably be a lot easier to manufacture than the hemi-ellipsoidal geometries that I worked with.

If you do want to study the fluid flow inside blood pumps then the last time I looked water, glycerin and a bit of Xanthan gum was the best non-Newtonian blood analog out there. You'll need to find pure grade Xanthan gum so that it is clear, not cloudy (mot much good for optical fluid flow measurements).