The Medrad Spectris Solaris contrast injection system consists of several subsystems. Medrad used MathWorks tools to design the pump motor controller and the safety system.
“Model-Based Design enabled us to mathematically model each subsystem,” says Kalafut. “We are now able to understand the system behavior and determine how quickly pressure builds in the pump.”
Medrad used MATLAB®, Simulink®, and Control System Toolbox™ to define system requirements, quantify system performance, tune the motor control loop response, predict motor current draw, and determine battery life expectancy—long before the actual hardware was available or the software was written.
“With Simulink, you can demonstrate your system or subsystem model so that others can see and understand the relationships among the components,” says Kalafut.
During final testing, the design team discovered that radio frequency (RF) energy coupling into the strain gauges was causing unwanted shutdowns. Kalafut’s team used Signal Processing Toolbox™ and DSP System Toolbox™ to design and exhaustively simulate a more sophisticated filter to condition the signals.
“We made the original simple average filter more sophisticated using DSP System Toolbox and Signal Processing Toolbox, and shaved three weeks off the project in the process,” says Kalafut.
Medrad uses MathWorks tools throughout the company to reduce development time, improve product quality, and research new technologies and product innovations.
Another team responsible for a new cardiovascular injection system was able to define various system requirements using an existing Simulink model. “That’s where Model-Based Design and Simulink have many advantages over C and Fortran,” says Kalafut.
For their new patient monitoring system, Medrad is automatically creating the embedded software from Simulink block diagrams using Embedded Coder®.
Using Simulink Real-Time™, they also created a hardware-in-the-loop simulation of the vascular injection pump fluid dynamics and the human vascular system. This real-time simulation will enable Medrad to reduce the number of tests using real fluids (“wet testing”), which are typically required to validate pump controller designs.