A cost-effective extracorporeal magnetically-levitated centrifugal blood pump employing a disposable magnet-free impeller.

In the field of rotary blood pumps, contactless support of the impeller by a magnetic bearing has been identified as a promising method to reduce blood damage and enhance durability. The authors developed a two-degrees-of-freedom radial controlled magnetic bearing system without a permanent magnet in the impeller in order that a low-cost disposable pump-head for an extracorporeal centrifugal blood pump could be manufactured more easily. Stable levitation and contactless rotation of the 'magnet-free' impeller were realized for a prototype blood-pump that made use of this magnetic bearing. The run-out of the impeller position at between 1000 r/min and 3000 r/min was less than 40 microm in the radial-controlled directions. The total power consumption of the magnetic bearing was less than 1 W at the same rotational speeds. When the pump was operated, a flow rate of 5 l/min against a head pressure of 78.66 kPa was achieved at a rotational speed of 4000 r/min, which is sufficient for extracorporeal circulation support. The proposed technology offers the advantage of low-cost mass production of disposable pump heads.

Estimation of the radial force using a disturbance force observer for a magnetically levitated centrifugal blood pump.

Evaluation of the hydraulic forces in a magnetically levitated (maglev) centrifugal blood pump is important from the point of view of the magnetic bearing design. Direct measurement is difficult due to the absence of a rotor shaft, and computational fluid dynamic analysis demands considerable computational resource and time. To solve this problem, disturbance force observers were developed, using the radial controlled magnetic bearing of a centrifugal blood pump, to estimate the radial forces on the maglev impeller. In order to design the disturbance observer, the radial dynamic characteristics of a maglev impeller were evaluated under different working conditions. It was observed that the working fluid affects the additional mass and damping, while the rotational speed affects the damping and stiffness of the maglev system. Based on these results, disturbance force observers were designed and implemented. The designed disturbance force observers present a bandwidth of 45 Hz. In non-pulsatile conditions, the magnitude of the estimated radial thrust increases in proportion to the flowrate, and the rotational speed has little effect on the force direction. At 5 l/min against 100 mmHg, the estimated radial thrust is 0.95 N. In pulsatile conditions, this method was capable of estimating the pulsatile radial thrust with good response.