Influence of compliance on flow rate waveforms in hydraulic circuits for in vitro modeling the human circulatory system

Abstract

Generating an artificial blood flow in a circle system is an important step in hemodynamic research; thus, the influence of circle system components on the pulsatile flow wave forms should be investigated. In this study, a circle system was built, in which two solenoid valves were controlled by a timer to transform a constant flow into a pulsatile one, and two customized compliances with five different aeration volumes were set up upstream and downstream of the test chamber, achieving twenty-five different wave forms. Then, the influence of the compliance settings on the flow rate wave form was investigated. From the experimental data, it can be concluded that the absolute value of the maximum value and the minimum value of the wave forms increases along the aeration of the downstream compliance but decreases along the aeration of the upstream compliance. For the second maximum value and the offset between the maximum value and the minimum value, remarkable differences were obtained between runs with aeration of zero compliance and nonzero compliance. Finally, an emulational flow was achieved with the up- and downstream aeration volume equaling 360mL and 180mL, respectively, which fit the realistic wave form well.