(E-165) Development of an Aneurysm Flow Model for Hands-On Teaching of Stress Analysis

Introduction: Designing medical devices requires a practical understanding of stress analysis, a challenging subject for many biomedical engineering students. Traditional teaching methods may not provide students with the necessary context to comprehend concepts like stress transformation or determination of principal stresses in the real-world. To address this issue, we developed an affordable and scalable abdominal aortic aneurysm flow model that provides a hands-on approach to teaching stress analysis. Our model allows students to investigate how endovascular stent intervention affects hoop stress and prevents aneurysm rupture.

Materials and Methods: The abdominal aortic aneurysm model was constructed using cost-effective materials. The model incorporates a simple linear actuator with a siphon pump, ball valve, reservoir, custom-made silicone aneurysm, and pressure transducer, flow sensor, and camera interfaced into a USB DAQ module (Figure 1). The endovascular stent was made from wire mesh and waterproof fabric. The overall cost of the flow module was compared to flow loops currently on the market. Furthermore, the flow loop was evaluated on its ability to reach target heart rate, blood pressure, and aneurysm diameter during systole and diastole.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: We were able to successfully develop and test an affordable abdominal aortic aneurysm flow loop that could reach its target parameters. The endovascular simulator achieved a heartrate of >85 BPM, blood pressure of >140/90 mmHg, and maximum diameter > 5cm during pulsatile flow. The total cost of the flow loop was under $400 (Table 1).


Overall, we developed a simple but effective abdominal aortic aneurysm flow model for teaching stress analysis on a budget. The quality of data was sufficient for achieving the objective of hands-on learning in an undergraduate teaching laboratory. We plan to evaluate the impact of this flow module on student learning in the future.


The creation of an affordable abdominal aortic aneurysm flow model offers a cost-effective solution for biomedical engineering students to gain practical experience in stress analysis. Commercially available endovascular simulators can be costly, preventing access for many educational institutions. A low-cost lab module enables scalability and reproducibility, allowing multiple groups to perform experiments simultaneously despite growing class sizes. By encouraging experiential learning, students can better contextualize classroom concepts such as stress analysis and become better prepared for their future careers as biomedical engineers.

Acknowledgements : The authors would like to thank the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University for funding through the ExCEL grant.