A Pneumatic Pressure Cycling System for an Artificial Heart

Included in this paper is a discussion of the operating principle, design, construction and testing of a stroke-limited, transistorized, pneumatic pressure cycling system for a single-chambered artificial heart. The system is free of valve-stiction catastrophes, and reveals that conventional calculations of heart power based on mean blood pressure, cardiac output and kinetic energy of the aortic blood should be augmented substantially to account for turbulence, valve resistance and pneumatic feedline distensibility. Graphs are presented to illustrate the over-all performance data.