New methods for the in vitro investigations of the flow patterns in artificial hearts

With the 3 applied methods one can investigate and obtain most of the interesting aspects of the flow within blood pumps: an integral picture of the flow, the development and position of stagnation flow, the time course of the velocity in points of special interest, the turbulence, and an integral picture of the mean boundary layer flow. The measurements have shown that the flow in the blood pumps is turbulent, the turbulence can be considered harmless, because its intensity is much weaker than that of a valve; there is a correspondence between the hotfilm method and the dye-washout method, and that there is a correspondence between the dye-washout method and the in vivo clot formation. Pumps, which have been designed according to these measurements, have been implanted in a series of calves. The pumps now have a smooth continuous inner surface and usually show no thrombus formation at all (anticoagulants are used) at the postmortem. Some animals do very well, such as the one in Figure 16 during his daily walk of 500 M on the treadmill. The animal is in its 45th day of survival and remains well to date.