Abstract
One concern about pulsatile rotary blood pumps is their physiological controller reactions when "venous return" changes. When a patient rises from a supine to a standing position, the blood volume in the leg veins is raised, owing to vasodilation, thus venous returns to the right atrium, and consequently, the left atrium is reduced. In this work, a physiological control law using a full-state feedback control method was developed in order to drive mechanical circulatory support. This strategy was used as a validated state-space pump model, to implement the controller and regulate the desired reference flow. The control law was assessed using a software model of the hemodynamical cardiovascular system interacting with the left ventricular assist device in different physiological conditions ranging from rest to exercise scenarios. Under these scenarios, heart failure disease was simulated by changing the hemodynamic parameters of the total blood volume, heart rate, cardiac contractility, and systemic peripheral resistance. The results were numerically observed during the postural changes. The rate of change in the physiological variables showed that the proposed control law can regulate the desired reference pump flow with minimal error within the acceptable clinical range in order to prevent suction and over perfusion.