Session: 03-05: Advanced Materials and Transduction Applications

Paper Number: 91114

91114 - Design Tradeoffs and Meso-Architecture in a Magnetorheological Elastomer Peristaltic Pump 

Recently, cardiovascular assist devices have played a significant role in the treatment of end-stage heart failure. However, the success rate of these devices is lessened due to adverse phenomena including mechanical shear stresses acting on red blood cells during blood circulation that result in red blood cell rupture, or hemolysis. Hence, the focus of recent experimental and computational studies lies at reducing the mechanical hemolysis in blood pumping technologies. Recent computational work has studied magnetically driven peristaltic mechanisms for pumping blood, resting on the assumption that peristaltic produces less hemolysis, an assumption not explicitly tested. Consequently, the first goal of this study was to compute hemolysis in a magnetically driven peristaltic system that utilized a magnetorheological elastomer sleeve, examining tradeoffs between hemolysis and blood flow characteristics. Additionally, given the relatively high-power consumption of producing magnetic fields, a secondary goal was to show that topology optimization design approaches improve the efficiency of electromagnetic energy to elastic strain energy transduction in the proposed model by predicting metamaterial-like meso architectures. A fully coupled solid mechanics, fluid dynamics, contact, electromagnetic and solid-fluid interaction simulation in COMSOL Multiphysics was utilized to model and simulate the magnetically driven pump. Results showed that increasing the magnetic field, while increasing pumped volume, increased hemolysis. Also, increasing the thickness of the magnetic rubber region in the pump decreased both the pumped volume and hemolysis. In addition to opposing tradeoffs in design variables, some design variables were shown to produce maxima at intermediate design variable values as well as having linear, sublinear, or quadratic effects on hemolysis. The complex nature of these tradeoffs suggests a rich design space for future study and device development.

Presenting Author: Niknam Momenzadeh Penn State