A novel artificial pancreas: Energy efficient valveless piezoelectric actuated closed-loop insulin pump for T1DM

The research article “A novel artificial pancreas: Energy efficient valveless piezoelectric actuated closed-loop insulin pump for T1DM”, co-authored by METU member Assoc. Prof. Mehmet Bülent Özer, has been published in Applied Sciences (Switzerland).

The objective of this work is to develop a closed-loop controlled insulin pump to keep the blood glucose level of Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) patients in the desired range. In contrast to the existing artificial pancreas systems with syringe pumps, an energy-efficient, valveless piezoelectric pump is designed and simulated with different types of controllers and glucose-insulin models. COMSOL Multiphysics is used for piezoelectric-fluid-structural coupled 3D finite element simulations of the pump. Then, a reduced-order model (ROM) is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink together with optimal and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers and glucose-insulin models of Ackerman, Bergman, and Sorensen. Divergence angle, nozzle/diffuser diameters, lengths, chamber height, excitation voltage, and frequency are optimized with dimensional constraints to achieve a high net flow rate and low power consumption. A prototype is manufactured and experimented with different excitation frequencies. It is shown that the proposed system successfully controls the delivered insulin for all three glucose-insulin models.

Kaçar, A., Özer, M. B., & Taşcioğlu, Y. (2020). A novel artificial pancreas: Energy efficient valveless piezoelectric actuated closed-loop insulin pump for T1DM. Applied Sciences (Switzerland), 10(15) doi:10.3390/APP10155294

Article access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/15/5294

Keywords:

APS; Closed-loop insulin pump; Piezo-fluid-structural coupled simulation; Valveless micropump

Other authors:
Kaçar, A. & Taşcioğlu, Y.

Acknowledgments:
This research received no external funding.