BALTIMORE — Johns Hopkins University engineers are working to develop a simple battery powered, pumpless ventilator to fill the need for the life-preserving breathing machines during the coronavirus pandemic.
The device can be manufactured quickly and relatively inexpensively because it has fewer moving parts, and can run for 24 hours on a single 12-volt battery.
It can use oxygen and pressurized air lines already in hospitals or from sources in the field. The engineers are testing their prototype on simulated patients.
As cases of the COVID-19 illness continue to climb in many states or remain high, ventilators have been in high demand and sometimes short supply. They afford patients critically ill with the respiratory disease time to heal by pumping needed oxygen into their lungs.
Hopkins teams also have sought other ways to boost their use, including by creating a special device so patients could share one machine. This team is also working on software to monitor multiple ventilators from a central location.
For the simple ventilators, the engineers are trying to determine the fastest way to manufacture them. The prototype parts were made with 3-D printing that could be too costly. They also are short on some supplies such as electromagnets needed to make valves.
The goal is to have 10,000 ventilators made with this design.
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