Ten Temple mechanical engineering students have spent the past year recreating the past in order to learn about the future.

The students have been re-engineering a third-generation kidney dialysis machine that was designed by Willem Kolff, who invented the first artificial kidney machine and is widely recognized as the father of artificial organs. Called the Twin Coil, the machine was the most widely used dialysis device in the world for nearly 20 years.

“The project was really exciting because it was an opportunity to get firsthand experience with bioengineering, which is sometimes difficult to do at the undergraduate level,” said one of the students, Karl Lewis, of Harleysville, Pa., who graduated from Temple’s College of Engineering in May with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering with a concentration in bioengineering.

Lewis, who will begin graduate studies in bioengineering at City University of New York in the fall, said that reverse-engineering Kolff’s pumping and blood filtration systems to re-create a working model gave the students insight into the bioengineering pioneer’s thorough process.

The project was conceived by Temple engineering adjunct faculty member Paul Fagette, a bioengineering historian and a visiting scholar at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. Fagette and Shriram Pillapakkam, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Temple, mentored the 10 Temple students, as well as five electrical engineering students from The College of New Jersey.

“We wanted to come up with a project that combined the design and manufacturing aspects of mechanical engineering with the applications to health science,” said Pillapakkam. “This was a project that made it possible to combine those elements.”

Pillapakkam said that the students — all seniors — worked on the project in addition to their capstone course required for graduation from the College of Engineering. “The students wanted to do this because they wanted to do something hands-on.”

In addition to Lewis, Temple students Stephen Barrett, Jonathan Childs, Leigh Cignavitch, Dean Cun, Dat Duong, Noel Prodigalidad, Benjamin Sauers, Tanya Singh and Christine Yoo worked on the project.

The students made several visits to the National Medicine and Health Museum to take measurements and photograph an original Kolff Twin Coils machine. While Kolff used a washing machine tub, juice cans, cellophane and window screening for his original design, the students fabricated their own parts.

“We wanted the students to fabricate from scratch as much as possible, so we bought sheet metal and tubing to make the dialysis machine in our machine shop,” said Pillapakkam, who noted that the Philadelphia chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers provided funding for the project.

“I love fabrication and metal work, and its rare these days to see this much metal working done in a bio-engineering project,” said Lewis.

The students’ hard work got favorable recognition in May, when Kolff’s son, Jack, inspected their work at the College of Engineering.

“The design is absolutely perfect,” said Jack Kolff, who as chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Temple Hospital founded the Delaware Valley’s first heart transplant program in 1983. “It brings back some strong memories. I remember we were winding the coils ourselves in the basement with my father using the fruit juice can that we had just emptied.

“I saw the development of these machines and I saw them in operation at the Cleveland Clinic,” he said.

When completed later this month, the re-created device will be sent to the Netherlands, where it will go on display at the Willem Kolff Museum in Kampden.