A drive mechanism for a blood pump integrated in an oxygenator

The achievement of a low priming volume of the components in an extracorporeal perfusion system for neonatal and pediatric patients is an open research question. This paper presents a concept of a pump-oxygenator in which an oxygenator and a pulsatile blood pump are combined in one housing. For operation of the pump-oxygenator, a special actuating system for the pump process was designed. It consists of a piston pump which is directly coupled with a voice coil actuator (VCA). A servo positioning system was developed to assure the piston motion according to predefined reference trajectories. First experimental results indicate the feasibility of driving this blood pump with a VCA. In an in-vitro study, the pump produced mean flow rates of 60-900 mL/min with stroke frequencies in the range of 60-240 beats per minute.