Analysis of the effects of the aortic conduit’s geometry and mechanical behavior on heart valve prosthesis’ test bench characterization

This work focuses on introducing more physiological conditions for testing of aortic valve prosthesis and comparing the changes in behavior of different valve substitutes in these conditions. The most used commercial test bench is the ViVitro Pulse Duplicator, composed by a pump, a model left heart, a flow measuring system and a data acquisition system. In this work we have shown that it is possible to exploit 3D printing to obtain an aortic phantom with physiological mechanical and geometrical characteristics and use it to perform pulsatile tests on aortic valve prosthesis.