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Blood Pump Development Using Rocket Engine Simulation Technology

Student-Run Research Seminar

Speaker: Cetin C. Kiris, Ph.D., NASA Ames Research Center
Location: 693 Kerr
Start time: Mon, Mar 4 2002, 11:00AM

This seminar reports progress made towards developing complete blood flow simulation capability in human, especially, in the presence of artificial devices such as valves and ventricular assist devices. Devices modeling poses unique challenges different from computing the blood flow in natural hearts and arteries. There are many elements needed to quantify the flow in these devices such as flow solvers, geometry modeling including flexible walls, moving boundary procedures and physiological characterization of blood. As a first step, computational technology developed for aerospace applications was extended to the analysis and development of a ventricular assist device (VAD), i.e. a blood pump. The primary purpose of developing the incompressible flow analysis capability was to quantify the flow in advanced turbopump for space propulsion system. The same procedure has been extended to the development of NASA-DeBakey VAD that is based on an axial blood pump. The technique solves the viscous incompressible Navier-Stokes equations using the pseudo-compressibility method. A high-order accurate upwind differencing and an efficient implicit scheme are used in the flow solver. The flow simulation procedure was developed to analyze an advanced turbopump impeller and an SSME configuration. Validated solution procedure was then applied to the development of DeBakey VAD. Various design improvements were made through the use this computational tool. For example, an inducer addition dramatically increased pumping efficiency thereby reducing the hemolysis to an acceptable level for human use and an optimum cavity redesign practically removed thrombus formation in the bearing area. Overall the VAD development was expedited with the help of CFD technology originally developed for rocket pump, thus enabling human implantation. Due to massive computing requirements, high-end computing is necessary for simulating three-dimensional flow in these pumps.