Synthesis and Evaluation of the Adaptive Control System for the Ventricular Assist Device by Using the Circulatory System Simulator

An on-line digital simulator using microcomputer system was developed to mimic the hemodynamic behavior of the human circulatory system under ventricular assist device (VAD) pumping. This simulator could calculate the response to the variation of the cardiac function or the driving mode of VAD in the real-time fashion. This simulator was used as the mock controlled object to evaluate and improve the algorithm of an adaptive controller of the drive unit for VAD. The adaptive one-step ahead controller was introduced as the precompensator for the Pi-controller, which decides the outflow volume from VAD in order to follow up the reference flow value by changing the systolic duration. It was confirmed that the proposed adaptive control system improved the response speed of the VAD driving system automatically according to the variation of the controlled object.