一种扁平气动人工肌肉驱动的直接心脏压缩装置

Direct Cardiac Compression Device Actuated by Flat Pneumatic Artificial Muscle

直接心脏压缩装置是一种用于增强心脏收缩能力的心脏辅助设备,可直接作用于心脏外表面,不与血液直接接触,避免了感染和凝血等问题。将软体机器人领域中一种扁平气动人工肌肉结构用作直接心脏压缩装置的驱动器。六个扁平气动人工肌肉以仿生的方式被等间距嵌入装置的弹性基底中,气压驱动来模拟心脏收缩生理运动。在20、30和40 kPa的压强下,通过仿真和实验得到不同腔室数量扁平气动人工肌肉的长度位移和径向位移,还通过实验得到不同数量驱动器下装置的容积变化。此外,分析了压强在20~80 kPa时以上指标的变化趋势,以表征装置辅助心脏收缩性能。结果表明:以1 Hz频率驱动时,驱动器及装置整体的收缩性能都随着压强的增加而呈非线性增加,且装置收缩性能随驱动器个数的增加而增加。装置性能变化趋势符合预期,为后续直接心脏压缩装置的设计提供了一种新的思路。

The direct cardiac compression device is a cardiac assist device for enhancing cardiac contractility,and can directly act on the outer surface of the heart without directly contacting the blood,avoiding problems such as infection and coagulation.A flat pneumatic artificial muscle structure in the field of soft robots was used as the actuator of a direct heart compression device.Six flat pneumatic artificial muscles were embedded in the elastic substrate of the device at regular intervals in a bionic way,and were pneumatically actuated to simulate the physiological movement of cardiac contraction.Under the pressures of 20,30 and 40 kPa,the length displacement and radial displacement of the flat pneumatic artificial muscles with different number of chambers were obtained by simulation and experiment,and the volume change of the device with different number of actuators was obtained by experiment.In addition,the change trend of the above indexes under the pressure of 20-80 kPa was analyzed to characterize the performance of the device in assisting cardiac contraction.The results show that at a driving frequency of 1 Hz,the contraction performances of the actuator and the whole device increase nonlinearly with the increase of pressure,and the contraction performance of the device increases with the increase of the number of actuators.The performance change trend of the device meets the expectations,providing a new idea for the design of the subsequent direct cardiac compression device.