Artificial Heart Valve

Welcome to Our Artificial Heart Valve Blog!

By: Alex Foley, Will Davis, Ryshena Providence, & Todd Spencer

Drexel University's Engineering Design 103

Spring Term 2015

Section 80

Group 9

In this Engineering 103 Freshman Design Course, the students are tasked with collaborating, designing, and creating a solution to a wide range of biomedical engineering problems. The students will be held accountable for thoroughly researching the problem, formulating a reasonable solution, and then designing it cooperatively in and outside of the design laboratory. For this particular laboratory, the students plan to create a new artificial heart valve. The students chose this particular topic because heart valves are one of the most valuable devices in the biomedical industry as “[e]very year, more than 100,000 US patients need to have their dysfunctional or diseased valves replaced with a prosthetic valve.” (Vesely) Furthermore, the motivation behind this design project is to propose a new way in which heart valves can be created in order to minimize difficulties that those in the biomedical engineering industry face. For example, a current valve can create blood clots and its’ longevity needs to be improved. In this design course, the students will initially learn to thoroughly research the necessary background information in order to get a sense of the problem that they are dealing with, and then later implement that valuable information into collaboratively designing a solution. The biggest task will be formulating an idea that is new and different than the heart valves that are currently used, making sure that it can be practically used, and lastly creating a tangible prototype of the device. Some technical challenges that the students will face include: choosing the material that will be most suitable to go into the human heart and properly sizing the design so that it can be scaled down 3-dimensionally and be printed accurately. The desired outcome of this project is to create a working heart valve, but also to expand the knowledge and engineering skills of all the students that are involved.

Labeled Diagram of Valves in the Human Heart [1]

To the left is a diagramed photo of the heart and it's corresponding valves. The group plans on creating an artificial heart valve for the Aortic semilunar valve since it is the largest valve in the heart.

*To check out the group's weekly progress, click on the overhead tabs above for the corresponding week(s).*

Sources:

[1] The sound of your heart beating is caused by the valves of your heart closing.. 2015.