International team develops a cheap ventilator with off-the-shelf components

The 26 physicists of the DarkSide experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, designed a new mechanical ventilator they hope to mass produce quickly and cheaply with off-the-shelf components.

The new design has been spearheaded by Cristiano Galbiati, a physicist at Princeton University in the US and the Gran Sasso lab. Galbiati said he started working on the design after speaking to a friend whose family made a contribution to an intensive care hospital being assembled on the site of Milan’s Expo in 2015.

Galbiati and the team, using the criteria by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the UK, came up with a blueprint called Mechanical Ventilator Milano (MVM).

The MVM would be compact and require fewer parts than most ventilators already on the market. Its simplicity derives from the fact that it controls the pressure of oxygen in a patient’s lungs using two fail-safe valves. Unlike more sophisticated ventilators, the MVM would not be able to regulate the volume of oxygen in someone’s lung, but just the pressure.

On 20 March, the team carries out a first set of tests in a laboratory near Bergamo, then they uploaded a preprint on arXiv outlining their design and asking scientists and medics for feedback to “speed the process of review, improvement and possible implementation”.

Galbiati said that the hard part is not developing the machine but the software that runs the device. “We have shifted the complexity to the controller and design software,” he explains. “This is something that particle physicists excel at. But if we want to do it quickly, we need the collaboration of the best programmers from the strongest particle physics labs.”

Adapted from: https://sciencemetro.com/physics/physicists-unveil-new-simplified-ventil...
More information: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10405