Performance evaluation of a venous valve

• Main Author: Koh, Gary
• Other Authors: Yeo Joon Hock
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/141269
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Venous valves are tissues located in veins which function to prevent backflow of blood. Chronic Venous Insufficiency (CVI) is a condition where these valves become dysfunctional due to disease or damage, resulting in retrograde flow of blood. Blood in the lower extremities of the human body will then experience increasing difficulty returning to the heart. Therefore, there is a need for a prosthetic venous valve design to replace these dysfunctional valves. This report details the steps taken to design an artificial vein conduit to be 3D printed, the fabrication of the test conduit with artificial venous valves, and the performance testing of these valves in the test conduit using a flow loop system experiment. Results in this experiment concludes that the design of the artificial vein conduit needs to be modified for the artificial valves to work. Specifically, either the size of the sinus needs to be increased, or the size of the artificial valves need to be decreased.