Re:New generation artificial heart implanted in patient
by iancmceachern on Friday July 16, 2021 @01:36PM
(#27858838)
This is where they started.
The story I was told was that president Lyndon Johnson was having heart trouble. Coming right out of the Apollo age, the powers that be said "we can send a person to the moon, why can't we build an artificial heart". They thought it would be a relatively simple problem to solve. At that time the battery technology wasn't there, so the only way to make something work was nuclear power. They came up with an implanted sterling engine, powered by a nuclear thermopile with the cold side of the heat flow being the human body. In that case, the limiting factor for how much power could be generated was how much heat could we dump into the human body without causing things like internal burns and necrosis. They actually built several prototypes, tested them in animals, but never in humans. These devices were enormous, they typically had a large thermopile/sterling engine portion connected by a shaft or hydraulic connection to the pumping portion of the device. Both needed to be implanted in the body, and the devices were entirely mechanical, no electronics needed. The thermopile drove the sterling cycle engine, which then either acted on hydraulic working fluid to actuate the blood pump, or used a shaft or similar to actuate the blood pump from the sterling engine.
The story I was told was that president Lyndon Johnson was having heart trouble. Coming right out of the Apollo age, the powers that be said "we can send a person to the moon, why can't we build an artificial heart". They thought it would be a relatively simple problem to solve. At that time the battery technology wasn't there, so the only way to make something work was nuclear power. They came up with an implanted sterling engine, powered by a nuclear thermopile with the cold side of the heat flow being the human body. In that case, the limiting factor for how much power could be generated was how much heat could we dump into the human body without causing things like internal burns and necrosis. They actually built several prototypes, tested them in animals, but never in humans. These devices were enormous, they typically had a large thermopile/sterling engine portion connected by a shaft or hydraulic connection to the pumping portion of the device. Both needed to be implanted in the body, and the devices were entirely mechanical, no electronics needed. The thermopile drove the sterling cycle engine, which then either acted on hydraulic working fluid to actuate the blood pump, or used a shaft or similar to actuate the blood pump from the sterling engine.
a few links: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.316... https://ota.fas.org/reports/8232.pdf https://www.nytimes.com/1972/03/21/archives/nuclear-heart-pu... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/the-t...