ADRC or adaptive controller - A simulation study on artificial blood pump

Active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) has gained popularity because it requires little knowledge about the system to be controlled, has the inherent disturbance rejection ability, and is easy to tune and implement in practical systems. In this paper, the authors compared the performance of an ADRC and an adaptive controller for an artificial blood pump for end-stage congestive heart failure patients using only the feedback signal of pump differential pressure. The purpose of the control system was to provide sufficient perfusion when the patients' circulation system goes through different pathological and activity variations. Because the mean arterial pressure is equal to the total peripheral flow times the total peripheral resistance, this goal was converted to an expression of making the mean aortic pressure track a reference signal. The simulation results demonstrated that the performance of the ADRC is comparable to that of the adaptive controller with the saving of modeling and computational effort and fewer design parameters: total peripheral flow and mean aortic pressure with ADRC fall within the normal physiological ranges in activity variation (rest to exercise) and in pathological variation (left ventricular strength variation), similar to those values of adaptive controller.