New artificial 'foam' heart pumps fluid

Researchers have designed a new type of lightweight and stretchable "foam" material that can possibly be used to create artificial hearts and prosthetic body parts.
Researchers at Cornell University created an artificial heart out of the foam which has the ability to pump fluid and contract easily.
Rob Shepherd, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell, said the team used this material because it has the potential to get approval from US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The material can be stretched by over 600 per cent its initial length, 'Medical Daily' reported.
"We can change the pores inside of it, so we can get more or less connectivity across the material for our fluid to pass through it. It's also very soft, so we don't have to apply a lot of pressure to get the fluid to move through the pores," Shepherd said.

The polymer foam starts as a liquid that can be poured into a mold to create shapes, and because of the pathways for fluids, when air or liquid is pumped through it, the material moves and can change its length by 300 per cent.
"We decided to use a heart as an example because it's a very complex shape, and it's a machine that everyone's familiar with, so by making a machine that looks like a heart that pumps like a heart, we thought it would demonstrate our material's capability the best," Shepherd said.
The researchers are now working on developing a prosthetic hand with the material.