May 2020

22 n CORONAVIRUS May 2020 www.drivesncontrols.com A race against time F ighting Covid-19 is a race against the clock. This is especially true in the highly specialised field of vaccine development andmanufacture. The well-publicised Oxford University programme is aiming to produce a vaccine by the autumn, compressing into a fewmonths a development programme that would normally take up to a decade to complete. The programme requires international collaboration on a massive scale. Without it, third world countries and advanced economies alike could be ravaged. The Oxford developers have partnered with the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceuticals firm AstraZeneca, which, to save valuable time, will start production ahead of the result of trials and of regulatory approval. Concurrent arrangements are beingmade with international partners to fast-track distribution, including to low- andmiddle-income countries. The initial trials of the vaccine include 1,000 volunteers aged between 18 and 55. In a significant acceleration, preliminary results could be available within weeks, with late-stage trials taking place in the middle of the year. “We may even end up with several different vaccines produced by different global consortia,”AstraZeneca’s CEO, Pascal Soriot, explained recently on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.“Pharmaceutical companies are used to collaborating and competing in equal measure and our hope is that by joining forces we can accelerate the globalisation of a vaccine to combat the virus and protect people from the deadliest pandemic in a generation. We will also produce the vaccine at cost throughout the duration of the pandemic.” Ramp up, ramp down In the manufacturing sector, the world is racing to build ventilators and other vital equipment in timescales that are no less impressive. As hospital admissions mounted, the UK found itself potentially short of 50,000 ventilators – impossible for the established ventilator manufacturers to fulfil by themselves. So emerged the Ventilator Challenge UK consortium. Chaired by Dick Elsy of the High- Value Manufacturing Catapult, the consortium includes Airbus, GKN Aerospace, BAE Systems, Ford, Inspiration Healthcare, Meggit, Microsoft, Penlon, Renishaw, Rolls-Royce, Siemens, Smiths Group, Thales Ultra Electronics, Unilever and several UK-based Formula 1 teams (Haas Racing, McLaren, Mercedes, Racing Point, Red Bull Racing, Renault Sport Racing, Williams Racing andWilliams Engineering). Futuristic Hololens augmented reality headsets were programmed to enable skilled aerospace and automotive production line workers to switch rapidly to the production of 10,000 potentially life-saving ventilators. The headsets have been used to fast-track the training of personnel, while allowing them to keep a safe distance from each other in accordance with social distancing guidelines. Open-source designs One ventilator model, with the codename Project Oyster, involved slight tweaks to an existing design from the specialist medical manufacturer, Penlon. A parallel effort, nicknamed Project Penguin, involved scaling up production of a model designed by Smiths Medical. Both projects were overseen by the Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). “Penlon and Smiths ordinarily have combined capacity of between 50 and 60 ventilators per week,”Elsy reports.“Thanks to the scale and resources of the wider consortium, we are targeting combined production of at least 1,500 units a week of the Penlon and Smiths models.” The Spanish carmaker Seat is also making ventilators at its Martorell facilitiy in Catalonia, designed in collaboration with Protofy.XYZ. These ventilators – comprising 80 electronic andmechanical components – incorporate adapted windscreen-wiper motors, gearbox shafts and printed gears, and undergo a thorough quality control procedure and sterilisation using ultraviolet light. Designers proposed 13 different prototypes before the final design was agreed upon. Workstations for 150 Seat employees were adapted to build the ventilators, which are being tested in collaboration with a local healthcare authority. Non-invasive breathing aids As the pandemic progressed, feedback from the frontline indicated that ventilators should only be used as a treatment of last resort and alternative, less invasive breathing aids were a preferable option. This reduced the demand for ventilators and the focus switched to designing and building alternatives. One of these was an ingeniously designed and inexpensive helmet-based ventilator that could be manufactured locally anywhere, bypassing the need for complex production processes. People could evenmake this“bubble helmet”at home. “It all comes down to creativity,”says Aurika Savickaitė, who tested the device in an intensive care unit at the University of Chicago.“Although most of the parts needed can be commonly found in the pulmonology ward, people have been improvising by using Ziploc bags, various 3D printed parts, plastic buckets and other non- typical parts.” In Germany,“ambu-bags”or“aero-bags”, used by first-aiders to provide respiratory support, were requisitioned. They comprise a mask that is pressed onto the patient's face with one hand, and a“balloon”that is pressed and released with the other. In the US, the linear actuator manufacturer built two prototype automated ambu-bag systems within a week (see page 44). Another novel redesign of these bag systems involved: n mounting the mask on the face of the Consulting editor Andy Pye looks at the remarkable efforts being undertaken by manufacturing companies, engineers and research scientists in the race to defeat the menace of Covid-19, and why manufacturing may never be the same again.