Abstract
The VentrAssist implantable Rotary blood pump, and has been promoted to the stage of clinical pilot trial, has no shaft or seal, antdthe device is nique in design since the impeller of the pump is suspended within the pump diffuser passively by hydrodynamic forces. The functions of pump impeller and motor rotor are combined in the singlw moving part. The rotor is aoused to ratete within thepump diffuser under the influence if a cmmutated electro-magnetic field proveded by stator windings which are asembled just outsaide the pump diffuser. To this end, the flow is very difficult to be measured using usual laboratory equipments. Therefor, Computational fluid dynaics (CFD) has been applied as one o improtant tool in the VentrAssinst^<TM> IRPB design and its validation procedure^<(1)>. Several CFD results such as; pump performance improvement, unsteady dydraoulic dynamic analysis, biocapability predection, validation and verification (V&V), and flow visualization have been performed. In this work, flow visualization is used to investigete the hydrodynamic characteristics of the VentrAssist IRBP. Since the physical manifestation of the VentrAssist pump leaves no space for the insertion of devices into the pump for observing the flow field, it is not possible to determine the flow inside the pump using experimantal flow visualization tools. Therefore, CFD becomes the only available method for observing the flow within the pump and hence is purposed in this study.
