Volkswagen explores using 3D printers to produce ventilators
dw.com
dw.com
Edit: It might contain electronics, but there is pandemic, not global war, so printed circuit manufacturing capacity is still there. Some modules with microprocessor are widely available worldwide and the design can be constrained using such module and 2 layer carrier printed circuit board. Machines to build these are available at better maker spaces. Pick and place machines are also there. So basically my timeline would as follows: order parts on Digikey and mouser today, go to maker space, start engraving printed circuit boards and launch 3D printers. On Monday or Tuesday digikey ships the parts. Maybe it will arrive on Wednesday, shipping companies are busy right now. On Wednesday I would launch pick and place machine and produce first batch of boards and next day I would start assembling manually the devices. On next weekend I would have probably 10 units to start tests. That’s working alone. With other tech savvy individuals output would be orders of magnitude higher. And this is not theory, in my previous workplace team of 8 blue collar workers was shipping 2000 units of comparable machinery per year.
Every ventilator manufactured can provide blue prints of their old designs. There has to be old design without microcontrollers that could be made in most machine workshops around the world. I guess a modern design would be to complicated to outsource to random machine shops with all the special electronics.
Nor should there be. Centralization isn't beneficial for this sort of problem.
Or the hardest part are the 3D printable parts?
The hard part is not the ventilation mechanism itself, but the specifications. Those ventilators must be controlled precisely, they must take into account the characteristics of COVID-19 patients. There is some overlap with ventilation for ARDS. The more you read into this subject, the more you realize how absolutely scary it is to actually design such a project. Lots of parameters have to be taken into account.
Read on mechanical ventilation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_ventilation
3D printed parts that where the air flow through must be air-tight.
Do you really want to give these people a new ventilator with which they are not familiar, which may lack features they need, and which might break down or malfunction in an unfortunate moment?
Maybe there is a place for such simple ventilators outside intensive care, e.g., as support for people who are able to breathe on their own and do not necessarily require mechanical ventilation, AND who are in a place without nasal O2 supply?
I don't know if they make them in-house, through a supplier, or both, but they have the capacity to not only get the things manufactured but deliver them too.
I hope I am wrong but it seems rather daunting.
Not everyone is still into low grade crap / toys. Although they're a useful starting point when first getting into making things. ;)
It is not a ventilator but the blower motor and various sensors are easily available on Aliexpress but it is the software that decides the correct airflow pressure at the right time when an apnea event occurs that is the secret sauce that needs to be clinically approved.
I presume the same for a ventilator - the software that helps the respiratory therapist to monitor the patient.
Not to dissuade anyone from trying to make open source ones a reality in the long run though...
This is all quite true, however from the sound of things places like New York City need both ventilators and staff.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...
It's pretty easy to build a diy injection molder. Why aren't the hobbiests with cnc lathes and mills making molds and sending them to the hobbiests without?
Many medical devices are made largely out of plastic, especially the disposable parts that are currently in short supply. 3D printers (FDM and SLS) commonly produce parts in many of these same plastics. Mills are generally used on metal, and the programmers and operators may not be as comfortable fabricating complex shapes from plastic. Mills are especially slow making thin plastic pieces, as they have to limit the feed- and pull-out-forces, and the heat generated, by the tool.
3D printers have little difficulty in making flexible / compliant parts (like close-fitting masks), because they exert nearly zero force on parts as they make them. Mills are even slower at making flexible plastic parts, because they have to operate at even higher RPMs, lower feed rates, and shallower depth-of-cuts in order to not deform the flexible part, even as they rip material off of it.
3D printers convert nearly all of the material you give them in to finished parts. Mills produce a lot (sometimes an awful lot) of waste that has to be shipped away and recycled back into usable material.
VW probably relies on CNC mills in their normal production pipeline, but may not have hard dependencies on their 3D printers. It might be much less disruptive for them to offer much or all of their 3D printing capacity to humanitarian efforts.
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The highest-output way to utilize CNC mills for bridging the shortage of ventilator / PPE parts would be to fabricate molds for injection-molded parts. VW (and other automakers) can definitely do this. The big holdups would be in acquiring designs for the parts (who knows how long that would take?), and in designing the molds (on the order of a week or two). Milling a mold takes hours or days depending on how complex it is. (The different pieces of a mold can be made by different machines.) Once fabricated, assembled, and inspected, a mold could produce hundreds of parts a day.
The necessary delay in designing, fabricating, and iterating molds (and other assemblies for the mass-manufacture of plastic parts) means that 3D printing will always beat it to the punch. For the next couple of weeks, expect most unofficially-manufactured medical parts to be 3D printed.
The supply of traditionally-manufactured medical parts should significantly increase later this year. The parts and assemblies to do that are/will-be made on CNC mills in the intermediate time.
Do they just go to Siemens and ask for a basic schematics they are happy to share that could potentially pass the certification process? How does the factory organises itself to change the production lines. I'm fascinated about this topic.
There is an open source effort to create a ventilator that can be produced in high volume: https://www.notion.so/1-Million-Ventilators-1035c5cf946445a7...
What is VW's approach to this and how do they plan for it. Grateful if anyone has more insight into this topic.
The most plausible way to handle these situations would be to have "pre-authorized" set of plans, bill of materials (or qualified components), and manufacturing process. Critically there would need to some sort of checklist and verification process to verify the equipment (preferably able to be performed by a third-party with minimal training). A consortium of FDA, WHO, etc worked with a established non-profit organization could design a set of plans and procedures for "emergency medical equipment". Then the entire world could be prepared for such emergencies, and possibly double as lower cost equipment for developing nations.
Likely established manufacturers would lobby hard against such measures (why would hospitals pay $50-60k for a ventilator when these "open plan" units only cost $1k?). There would also be questions of reliability of such devices. These issues could be mitigated by authorizing use of such equipment only during state of emergencies. This would make sense as such equipment would possibly be of lower (or just uncertain) quality compared to normal devices. But the laws allowing for this would need to be passed, and again, that's the difficult part. The technology/manufacturing/3d printing is almost inconsequential _without_ appropriate legal infrastructure in place.
An "iron lung" seems like something a lot easier to design in such a way that it won't harm people.