Engineers created a silicone heart with a 3D printer. Tests have shown that it beats and pumps blood like a real human heart.
The artificial heart functions just like the present, although so far it can only work up to 3,000 strokes. This was told by the creators of the world’s first heart printed on a three-dimensional printer.
The advantages of the new development are the compactness, light weight and functionality of the new device, which has a high chance of replacing the real heart in the future if necessary. It’s about a soft silicone heart that beats and pumps blood almost exactly like the real heart.
Artificial hearts and other similar devices are usually developed and used as temporary substitutes for real and vital organs. While a person is waiting for his turn to receive a real donor’s heart, he is transplanted to an artificial device whose operating time is limited.
Thus, scientists are always looking for ways to develop new solutions and improve existing “blood pumps”, for which they constantly study biocompatible materials. The new silicone heart was the development of the scientists of the Technical School of Zurich, who tried to achieve the maximum exact imitation of the real heart both in functional terms and dimensional.
The weight of the silicone heart is 390 g. In testing the device, researchers used a liquid with a similar viscosity, like human blood. Unfortunately, the artificial heart created by the method of 3D printing is still able to work no more than 45 minutes, although otherwise it showed excellent results.
