The current left-ventricle assist device (LVAD) system is centered around a custom, levitating impeller blood pump for use in human patients with cardiac disease to boost blood flow. The main unique feature of the blood pump is its ability to magnetically levitate the impeller within the pump's housing, drastically reducing friction losses and increasing pump lifetime.

The purpose of the project is to miniaturize the system such that it can be scaled to more portable configurations, eventually for use in human patients. As a life-critical system, it must be highly reliable and safe. Since this system is still in development, our end-user is both the human patients as well as the physicians and engineers involved in its further development. To this end, our system will provide low-level access to the control system including the ability to re-program and re-configure.

The current pump consists of the magnetic levitation coils, a three phase motor to spin the impeller, and several hall-effect sensors to sense the position of the front and back of the impeller. To keep the pump levitating, the force applied by the magnetic coils are constantly readjusted to compensate for positional error.

The control system is consists of a microcontroller connected to analog-to-digital converters for the hall effect sensors and motor control circuitry for the coils and the 3-phase motor. This microcontroller must be powerful enough to handle the control algorithm which keeps the pump levitating and rotating. Power is provided from a battery pack on the outside of the body. The entire external assembly needs to be robust to water splashes, drops from approximately hip level to floor, and regular human movement.

Project Name

Reducing VAD electronic package size

Project Number

P11021

Project Family

Biomedical Device Development

Track

Assistive Devices and Bioengineering

Start Term

2010-1 Fall

End Term

2010-2 Winter

Faculty Guide

Edward Hanzlik

Primary Customer

Dr. Steven Day

Project Members

Andrew Hoag (CE)

Juan Jackson (EE)

Smiha Sayal (IE)

Zachery Shivers (EE)

Nicole Varble (ME)

Jason Walzer (ME)

P11021 Team Photo