Design, analysis and development of antimicrobial ventilator splitters for four patients

Abstract

3D Printers produce physical 3D objects by printing layer by layer from digital data. The digital data in the form of CAD models can be obtained either from any advance CAD packages or scanned models from a 3D Scanner. Due to the extreme shortage of ventilators available in India and continues increase of corona virus patients’ day by day there is a need of more ventilators. Five percent of patients who are suffering from corona virus need ventilator support for breathing. To overcome the shortage of ventilators, ventilator splitters were developed and it can be shared by many patients for oxygen supply.It can able to control flow of oxygen from the ventilator splitters to different patient’s lung sizes. So in this research a ventilator splitter, design in CATIA software, Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) analysis was done using ANSYS16.0 and fabricated by process of Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) using antimicrobial PLA material. Antimicrobial PLA is biodegradable plastic integrated with copper nano-particles, which will restrict the 3D printed parts contaminating bacteria’s. So, copper nano-particles PLA can be used for producing ventilator splitters for splitting oxygen to the four patients at a time emergency situation in hospitals. From the CFD analysis it is observed that the oxygen maximum static pressure (1.058e +002Pa) is at inlet of the ventilator and minimum static pressure (-2.17e+002Pa) at outlet of the ventilator splitters. The maximum oxygen flow velocity is 2.121e+001m/s and there is no change of temperature of the flow. It is also seen that net mass flow rate and net heat transfer rate are 0.0032676226kg/s and -0.051416769w respectively.