Arduino control of a pulsatile flow rig

Abstract

This note describes the design and testing of a programmable pulsatile flow pump using an Arduino micro-controller. The goal of this work is to build a compact and affordable system that can relatively easily be programmed to generate physiological waveforms. The system described here was designed to be used in an in-vitro set-up for vascular access hemodynamics research, and hence incorporates a gear pump that can deliver up to 1.5 l/min in a test flow loop. After a number of simple identification experiments to assess the dynamic behaviour of the system, a feed-forward control routine was implemented. The resulting system was shown to be able to produce the targeted patient-specific waveform with less than 3.6% error. Finally, we outline how to further increase the accuracy of the system, and how to adapt it to specific user needs.