University Engineer's COVID-19 Response: Open-Source Ventilator Design
As COVID-19 continues to place immense challenges on medical communities, one of the most pressing threats for hospitals across the country is a shrinking supply of ventilators. Vanderbilt University researchers are currently on the second version of a ventilator prototype and hope to soon move into the final prototype phase before manufacturing. “Maker communities around the globe are stepping up to address the pressing medical challenges presented by COVID-19, such as the need for personal protection equipment like face masks,” says Vanderbilt engineer and project leader Kevin Galloway. In the first prototype, Galloway wrapped nylon webbing around an Ambu bag and attached it to the crank arm of a windshield wiper motor to apply the repetitive squeezing force. The design worked, but the amount of squeeze needed to be controlled more precisely. Inspired by the Scotch Yoke Mechanism, Galloway built his second prototype using the same motor, drawer glides, and plywood — widely available materials and tools. Sensors and controls were added to the design to improve the safety and tune the “in-and-out” ratio to match normal breathing. His longterm goal is to make the design publicly available so anyone can build it.
Transcript
00:00:01 One of the main concerns that we all have about this COVID19 situation is running out of supplies and among these life critical life-saving supplies are ventilators and the people really working out these machines. One of my colleagues at Vanderbilt Medical Center called me and said hey we need something, this could get really bad. We got to start working on this. Our goal here was to build a device that would be, anybody could build. So we built it entirely out of plywood, out of a windshield wiper motor, out of parts that we could easily source, so if we had to, in our garages, we can build several hundred of these to meet an emergency need. So that was the priorities of what we're trying to do. Now we have a prototype that's almost quite ready for for use potentially, so that's reassuring that we're able to kind of
00:00:47 leverage all this expertise at Vanderbilt to get things done in such a short-time.