One of the main advantages of the Peristaltic
Pump is cleanliness. It also utilizes another advantage: Fragile blood cells are
not damaged by this pump. The flexible tube (in this drawing its edges are
blue and yellow for clarity) is connected on the inlet side to the patient's artery,
and on the outlet side to the patient's vein.
In this example three rollers
on rotating arms pinch the tube against an arc and move the fluid along. There
are usually three or four sets of rollers.
Peristaltic pumps have a variety
of medical applications. They can be used to add nutrients to blood, to force
blood through filters to clean it, or to move blood through the body and lungs
during open heart surgery.
(This is a 12-frame
animation, converted to animated GIF format for Internet transmission. (Note:
On some Internet browsers it may be displayed much less smoothly than the CD-ROM
version, where the frames are timed to a thousandth of a second.))
