IISc engineers begin work on ventilator prototype

BENGALURU: A team of engineers at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is building indigenous ventilator prototype for COVID-19 patients.
The IISc team is building a prototype of an electro-mechanical ventilator using components found or made in India, based on guidelines issued by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

IISc said the prototype is expected to be ready within the next couple of weeks.

“We are building it so that anyone can use it free of cost,” said T V Prabhakar, Principal Research Scientist at the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering (DESE), IISc. and one of the founders of the project.

Analysts suggest India, like other countries, is expected to face a huge shortage of ventilators, an essential medical device for COVID-19 patients. There are currently about 40,000 ventilators available across the country, but the country will need several thousands of them if the number of severe cases go up, said analysts.

“For the last 10 days, we have been working day and night to get this technology going. We hope that by the end of April, manufacturers can have their own prototypes done, which they can scale up very quickly,” said Gaurab Banerjee, Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering and one of the project coordinators.

The team of engineers is also getting suggestions from doctors to simplify the interface and create a dashboard pre-loaded with approved settings. This would allow it to be operated quickly in an emergency even by untrained technicians or nurses, said IISc.

A well-designed ventilator has built-in sensors and actuators that allow doctors to set the volume and pressure of gas delivered to the patient precisely depending on the severity of their illness.

“But many ventilator components are currently not manufactured in India. This prompted the IISc team to build some components and co-opt others. To store and mix air and oxygen, for example, they simply reused sedimentation tanks found in household RO water purifiers. The mixing process that we have come up with has parallels to those in gas turbines and industrial burners, where the ratio of fuel and oxidizer is carefully controlled,” said team member Pratikash Panda, Assistant Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering.

The researchers are also in talks with potential manufacturers to check the inventory of critical components before including them in the final design.