Blood Analogues and Flow Stress Visualization for Medical Device Testing
Material Measurement Laboratory, Materials Science and Engineering Division
NIST only participates in the February and August reviews.
Medical devices that pump blood should do so without damaging the blood. Damage may be either homolysis or thrombosis, which are both life-threatening conditions. To aid those responsible for medical device approval, we seek to develop methods to measure local stress states in benchmark constriction-flow geometries that lead to blood damage. For example, we seek improvements in flow-field imaging, flow birefringence imaging, and model fluids that replicate non-Newtonian blood rheology and that contain suitable probes.