Lee Felsenstein / lee@fonlyinstitute.com / 11 Feb. 2021
We are a group of engineers and technical professionals who have formed to address the problem of the worldwide shortage of medical ventilators in pandemic conditions. We understand that new designs suited to the requirements of global production will be needed in order to make possible the manufacture of ventilators of good quality in the volumes that will be necessary in this and future pandemics.
We are working together, voluntarily bringing decades of experience, to create open source electronic and software designs that can be used without charge by anyone. Our investment is our time spent applying our experience.
We know that manufacture will have to be carried out by many different organizations around the world with different ranges of engineering capabilities – accordingly, we are creating a “reference design” which will work as designed (as we will demonstrate by building several) and which can provide a library of design segments for implementation by a final level of product development engineers.
We will provide not only the design files, but will also publish the calculations and source programming in forms generally accessible by engineers who may not be familiar with particular tools and development programs. As part of this effort, we are first developing a simulation model that will demonstrate the performance of the eventual design, as specified by the final developers with the mechanical elements they specify.
Later physical designs can be checked against this simulator to verify performance and to allow analysis and modification of the designs after they leave our hands. As part of this simulation, we have defined a control panel model to allow prospective users to experience the behavior of the final product before that actual product is built. This will allow product designers to optimize their user interfaces to local preferences and protocols.
Our design decisions will be based upon optimizing the possibility of low-cost, widespread ventilator manufacture in a sustainable economic environment. We envision the creation of a set of products supported by engineers working close to the point of use who have gained much of their practical knowledge from adapting, modifying and implementing the elements we create.