Left atrial pressure controller design for an artificial heart.

This paper describes the application of a dynamic compensator technique to the left atrial controller design for use with a portable artificial heart drive system. The compensator is designed using a method in the field of multivariable control. This controller design is based on the physical models of the actuator and blood pump system. The analysis shows that there exists a minimal compensator with a dimension of one. The computer simulation demonstrates the acceptable, robust control performance of the left atrial pressure for a relatively small parameter variation of the vascular system model when all the poles of the closed-loop system are assigned to appropriate values.