Artificial Gravity and its Cardiovascular Effects*

A well-known phenomenon of an extended stay in microgravity is cardiovascular deconditioning – a collection of hemodynamic changes including loss of blood volume and altered cardiac function. One proposed method of combating this phenomenon is by generating artificial gravity. However, little is known about long-term effects of the most common method of generating artificial gravity: centrifugal rotations. The two primary concerns are the presence of a gradient, wherein the magnitude at the head is different from that at the feet, and a fictitious Coriolis force that may affect the flow of blood in the cardiovascular system. To study these effects, we developed a variational finite-element model for numerically solving the Navier-Stokes equations which can be used to model blood flow in a small segment of a blood vessel under various conditions, including different parameters for the artificial gravity and different specific blood vessels in the body. Further, we propose a new method of generating artificial gravity to mitigate these effects. The artificial gravity experiment is a disk of material that will generate angular oscillations at ultra-sound frequency ranges. An oscillatory design will also remove the need for counter-rotating masses to balance the angular momentum.