Contact: Bob Ratliff
Computer software developed for aircraft and naval designs by Mississippi State University engineers now is helping create a new generation of artificial hearts.
Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have developed an artificial heart that overcomes damage to blood from the pumping action-one of the biggest problems with such devices. The unit designed at the Pennsylvania school pumps blood with a rotor suspended in a magnetic field.
Maglev--magnetically levitated--pumps have the potential to be a permanent alternative to a heart transplant. The technology has been licensed to a Pittsburgh company, which hopes to make it available commercially in three to five years.
MSU's contribution to the development is called AFLR3, an unstructured grid generation software. Based on any complex input geometry, the program creates numerically discrete approximations called grids. Made up of triangular and tetrahedral cells, the grids can be used by engineers to "build" computer models of complex devices.
The first work by Mississippi State's Engineering Research Center with grid technology involved improved designs for naval vessels and military aircraft.
"The unstructured grid program allowed us to handle the geometry during a computational simulation," said ERC scientist David L. Marcum. "This is essential for any type of flow, whether it's the external air flow over an airplane wing or internal flows as within a heart valve."
Pittsburgh researchers have found that the MSU software produces high-quality grids that reduce the time to perform unstructured grid generation from weeks to just a few hours.
"We started out with some other software that didn't create grids of high enough quality," said Greg Burgreen of the UP department of surgery. "We were getting nowhere with them."
Burgreen, whose doctoral research involved aircraft wing design at the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia, was familiar with the Mississippi State research. A visit to the ERC website provided him information about the AFLR3 software, which was just recently developed.
Now, MSU's Marcum, a professor of mechanical engineering, and a team of graduate students at the Engineering Research Center are hard at work developing a more advanced software program called "SolidMesh," which should enable even faster information processing.
Having found MSU's AFRL3 software just what they needed, Pitt medical scientists now are conducting tests with a SolidMesh prototype.