Tesla has released a video showing how its engineering team is working to create a ventilator from car parts. The company has pledged to create ventilators to aid in the treatment of patients with coronavirus, officially called COVID-19.
“We’re trying to make some ventilators out of some car parts,” the engineers explain, “so that we can help out with the medical issue without taking away from the supply.”
The prototype design the team has created works by taking a hospital-grade air supply and sending it into a mixing chamber, which is a reused car part. In the mixing chamber, air is combined with oxygen before being sent through a wall body, which creates pressure and volume waveforms in the air. The air comes out and passes through a series of sensors like a flow rate sensor and a pressure sensor, before being sent through a filter and into the patient’s lungs.
When the patient exhales, the carbon dioxide-rich air they breathe out is carrying through a second set of pipes with more sensors before reaching a valve which maintains positive air pressure in the lungs to help the patient breathe more easily.
Tesla shows how it’s using EV parts to build ventilators [Digital Trends]