With the continuous spread of overseas epidemic, the global demand for ventilators is growing rapidly, and ventilators are in a global emergency.
I hope that with everyone’s efforts, the global shortage of ventilators can be alleviated.
Some manufacturing giants have also begun to respond to the government’s call to turn to the production of ventilators. A large number of enterprises have emerged in Europe and the United States to join the queue of "cross-border" production of ventilators: GM, Ford, Rolls-Royce, Tesla, Dyson, Airbus, etc. There are even some open source projects of DIY ventilators on the Internet.
However, the manufacture of ventilator is a complicated process, which needs to face many problems. These difficulties are mainly reflected in two aspects:
01
There is a great demand for raw materials.
Unlike masks, which mainly need non-woven cloth and lava cloth, a respirator needs hundreds of materials, and they come from all over the world. For machines that are used for 20-30 thousand hours at a time, it is particularly important to have stable and durable hardware, and the core hardware technologies such as turbines and sensors have high requirements.
02
The authentication cycle is long.
Both belong to medical materials, forehead temperature gun belongs to the second class of medical devices, while ventilator belongs to the third class of medical devices. The division of the second and third classes represents the danger level, and the third class is the highest level of medical devices. The time for registration and filing is generally one and a half years, and some clinical trials take longer.
Different from masks and hand sanitizers, the production of ventilators has high technical barriers, requiring skilled and professional staff and strict supervision system to ensure the life safety of patients. Even for professional medical equipment manufacturers, it may take up to 40 days to produce a ventilator. Cross-border enterprises starting from scratch may take 18 months to achieve mass production.
According to relevant sources, ventilators also involve many patents, and manufacturers may also face patent infringement.
Faced with a huge market gap, Medtronic recently responded to the call of FDA and announced that it would publicly share the design specifications of its Puritan Bennett?560(PB 560) ventilator, so as to help industry participants quickly evaluate the ventilator manufacturing scheme and respond to the COVID-19 epidemic worldwide.
John Jordan, external communication director of Medtronic Minimally Invisible Therapies Group, said: "We are sharing the design specifications of [PB 560] so that participants from all walks of life can evaluate the options of rapid ventilator manufacturing to help doctors and patients cope with COVID-19."
PB 560 product and service manuals, design requirements documents, manufacturing documents and schematic diagrams are now available in Medtronic.com/openventilator.
This move of Medtronic undoubtedly provided great help to some non-professional companies in how to transform the existing production line.
While praising Medtronic’s sense of social responsibility, Weisheng Technology has also upgraded the flow sensor F1031 produced by the company to make it more suitable for use on ventilators, and at the same time, it accepts the special customization needs of users, ensuring the quality and productivity to the greatest extent, and making a small contribution to the global anti-epidemic.
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