Formula 1 teams race to build ventilators

Engineers from aerospace, consumer tech and motorsport have answered the government’s plea

In mid-March 2020, just a few days after COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, the UK government put out a plea to businesses to help make ventilators and components. To aid any companies wanting to help, the government produced a list of guidelines for designing Rapidly Manufactured Ventilator Systems (RMVS). There was a huge response, with some of the biggest names in aerospace, technology and engineering stepping up to the plate.

At the time, the UK only had some 8,000 ventilators, and the government thought that an additional 30,000 machines, made as quickly as possible, should allow the NHS to deal with the enormous increase in respiratory patients arriving at hospital with COVID-19.

One consortium, VentilatorChallengeUK, which includes Airbus, McLaren, Mercedes, Ford and RollsRoyce along with other household names, is working on two ventilators: one is based on the Penlon ESO2, which is the clinicians’ first choice for the RMVS; and a scaled-up version of an approved existing ventilator, the Smiths paraPAC, commonly used in ambulances. These machines can be assembled from materials and parts already available in the UK supply chain. In mid-April, the Penlon ventilator received regulatory approval and the government placed an order for 15,000 of the devices, making it the first new British ventilator to receive the go-ahead.

While Penlon and Smiths can usually create 50 to 60 ventilators per week, with the help of the consortium, they are hoping this can be boosted to 1,500 a week by early May. “Ventilators are intricate and highly complex pieces of medical equipment and it is vital that we balance the twin imperatives of speed of delivery with the absolute adherence to regulatory standards that is needed to ensure patient safety,” warns VentilatorChallengeUK chairman Dick Elsy.

Elsewhere, the billionaire inventor James Dyson, who is best known for his space-age vacuum cleaners, announced that he had designed a new batteryoperated ventilator from scratch. The government has put in an order for 10,000 of these CoVent devices.