As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in early 2020 concerns grew about lack of ventilators to support ICU patients. In response, Medtronic released the designs and documentation for their Puritan Bennet 560 ventilator as open-source documents. Under the Medtronic open source program, 3DS took those thousands of documents, uploaded them to the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform on the cloud and spent many man-months organizing them in context to give a massive head start to any company who wants to use these open source files to build ventilator technology. The following is a demonstration on how to make use of the modeling and simulation tools on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to construct and evaluate design concepts for this open source project.

In early 2020 reports emerged of doctors devising splitters to hook multiple patients to a common ventilator. This inspired SIMULIA Industry Process Expert @MS to explore how this could be done more efficiently and effectively with modeling and simulation on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. The starting point was an intuitive design by a human with no simulation to guide the design. A CFD analysis was performed of the human design to benchmark and quantify the value simulation would bring to improving the design.

The design was optimized with topological optimization roles (GDF and FMK) on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform using steady state CFD and was accomplished in several hours. The generative design based on steady state CFD was also shown to be more than 60% more efficient than the intuitive human design. 

The 4-way splitter valve was manufactured in the 3DEXPERIENCE lab in Waltham Massachusetts thanks to the support of @AM and @AB. In total, the design went from ideation to creation in less than 1 day and simulation improved the performance by more than 60% illustrating the value of connecting modeling to simulation with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

This work will be highlighted at the 3DEXPERIENCE Modeling & Simulation Conference in November, tune in to learn more details.

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