Coronavirus: CERN physicists create simple, cheap ventilator which can be deployed outside hospitals
Physicists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland, which has the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator are now using their expertise in the fight against COVID-19.
The scientists are creating a novel streamlined ventilator called HEV (High Energy physics community Ventilator), which can be easily manufactured and integrated into the hospital environment to support COVID-19 patients. The ventilator is being designed in a way so that it can be deployed in areas with limited resources and unstable power distribution, making it possible to power it with batteries, solar panels or emergency power generators.
The research team has created a prototype, and the proposed design has also been published. The initiative is being led by a team of physicists and engineers from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN, touted as one of the world’s biggest scientific experiments. The LHCb aims to explore what happened after the Big Bang that allowed matter to survive and build the universe we inhabit today.
The ventilator project is supported by several CERN services and is part of the “CERN against COVID-19” initiative, which was launched in March. CERN has set up a task force to identify and support contributions from the organization’s 18,000-strong global community to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the pandemic spreading, the number of hospitalized patients requiring ventilators has led to a global shortage of supplies. “The worldwide medical community currently faces a critical shortage of medical equipment to address the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, this is the case for ventilators, which are needed during COVID-19 related treatment at the onset, during the intensive care phase and during the very extended recovery times. Companies are scaling up production, but this will not be sufficient to meet the demand according to the current forecasts,” says the team in their design proposal.
The concept relies on inexpensive and readily available components. “We propose a ventilator design to be integrated into a hospital environment. The HEV concept is based on components that are simple and cheap to source, complies with hospital standards for external connections and operating modes, and supports the most requested operation modes. The unit is not yet an approved medical device and is in the concept and prototyping stage,” say the experts who have sought feedback as the project progresses.
(HEV Ventilator Proposal)
The scientists realized that the types of systems used to regulate gas flows for particle physics detectors could be used to design a unique ventilator. The HEV design could be used for patients in mild or recovery phases, enabling the more high-end machines to be freed up for the most intensive cases, says the team. It is a “safety-first design, intended to satisfy clinical requirements for the most requested ventilation modes” for COVID-19 patients.
The first stage of prototyping was achieved at CERN on March 27. “The desired physical characteristics of the pressure regulators, valves and pressure sensors are now being refined, and the support of clinicians and international organizations is being harnessed for further testing within hospital settings. The control software for this device will be encapsulated in a dedicated microcontroller that will, along with other low-power components, enable the deployment of the HEV in areas with limited resources and unstable power distribution,” explain the scientists.
The aim is to release CERN developments against COVID-19 under the “CERN Open Hardware Licence” so that equipment may be produced wherever there is a need, and adapted to local regulatory frameworks, explains the team.
Initiatives by CERN scientists already underway include the production of one tonne of sanitizer gel to distribute to local emergency response teams. Studies are underway to deploy the particle physics community’s considerable computing capacity to assist in the search for a vaccine.