Calculating the Pumping Capacity of the Human Heart

Dr. Jarvick (sp?) who invented the mechanical heart probably did. Look for him in Utah, USA

Hey, is there any engineer tried to calculate the capacity

I would say that many engineer's have over the years, a few doctors too. Here is a link to some info about the volume of the heart.

Enjoy

The Biomedical Engineering Handbook edited by Jos. Bronzino has a good overview of this.

http://www.amazon.com/Biomedical-Engineering-Handbook-Joseph-Bronzino/dp/084930461X

The answer is Heck Yes; it happens practically every day in the development of, for example, cardiac ultrasound machines.

We're always coming up with new ways to indirectly or even directly measure preload, afterload, segmental contribution, pressures before, inside and after valves...the heart's output is studied to a degree that maybe even F1 engine designers can't match.

Just for example, we now calculate plastic deformation/wall stress to determine which particular areas of a single chamber (the left ventricle, usually) aren't contributing enough, are compensating, or are dead and aneurysmal.

This is analogous to, yet more extensive than determining ring friction, gas flow, pressure and power differences from one cylinder to another.

Its been a while but we used to do cardiac outputs in the ICU I worked/ It involves a patient having whats called a triple lumen sawn ganz catheter in the sub clavian/ex or int juggular/ or the subclavian. the catheter runs through the vein to the heart and into the pulm artery. Iced water is injected into a port just before the heart and a timer is started. There is a temp probe at the end of the cath and the time it take to show a temp change is calculated back as cardiac output. now a days I beleive that they use CT or MRI that can measure individual stroke volumes and just multiply by the rate. hope this helps

Bill

One of the beautiful things about circulation of the blood is that the Reynold's Number is less than 2300 everywhere. It does keep the pump power requirements down to a minimum...

On the basis that the human heart pumps the average blood contents of the average human body 3 times a minute and that the average human body contains 5 litres of blood and the average human lives for 70 years.

A heart can pump 8200m3 of blood in its life. thats the same volume as 3.3 olympic swimming pools!