MODEL REFERENCE ADAPTIVE CONTROL OF BLOOD PRESSURE

Several adaptive controllers have been designed to control the infusion of the drug sodium nitroprusside for the purpose of reducing high blood pressure in post surgical patients. Most of these controllers have not considered one or more factors of the controlled system including the stochastic background noise present in the patients, the time varying nature of the patient, and the constraints imposed on the control input and system output. This thesis presents a model reference adaptive controller which takes into account all of these factors. Through simulations on a personal computer, the robustness of the controller is demonstrated in the presence of noise, time varying parameters, and deterministic disturbances. Furthermore, this performance is achieved without requiring any prior knowledge of the system delay.