The CAE Air1 ventilator has been certified by Health Canada. Designed and manufactured in Montreal, Canada, the ventilator is destined for hospitals across Canada where it will be used in the fight against COVID-19. Certification comes two months after CAE signed a contract with the Government of Canada to manufacture and supply 10,000 ventilators.

The CAE Air1 mechanical ventilator can deliver pressure control, volume control, and pressure support ventilation using room air or pressured oxygen. It uses an intuitive, simple touchscreen interface and is bundled with on-demand ventilator training, adaptive e-learning modules related to COVID-19 patient management, and 24/7 customer support. It will support Intensive Care Units patients treated for COVID-19.

The CAE Air1 ventilator’s more than 500 parts were chosen from more than 130 Canadian suppliers.

"Since the beginning of the pandemic, CAE was the first to receive certification from Health Canada for an entirely new ventilator. It was created and manufactured in Canada, and we are proud that it will help save lives in the fight against COVID-19," said Marc Parent, CAE's president and CEO. "The agility shown by CAE in designing and succeeding to have the CAE Air1 ventilator certified in a fraction of the usual time is a testament to the strength of CAE's innovation, engineering talent, and advanced manufacturing capabilities. I am proud of our team for rising to this humanitarian challenge and strengthening Canada's self-sufficiency in the medical field during these unprecedented times."

CAE will now start shipping hundreds of CAE Air1 ventilators to the Government of Canada every week.

"CAE, one of Canada's leading aerospace firms, stepped up early on with their commitment to produce a made-in-Canada ventilator design that will help save the lives of COVID-19 patients battling the disease. Today's announcement is a testament to CAE's agility and innovative capability. I am glad that we were able to support CAE in accelerating the design and manufacturing of CAE Air1 ventilator that is now ready to be used by our frontline healthcare workers," said the Hon. Navdeep Bains, Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry.

Each year, CAE trains more than 220,000 civil and defense crewmembers, including more than 135,000 pilots, and thousands of healthcare professionals worldwide.

Detroit, Michingan – General Motors typically relies on 3D printing to help launch new vehicles, such as the first-ever mid-engine Chevrolet Corvette. During the COVID-19 outbreak, the same technology played a critical role in helping the team transition from making vehicles to medical devices in a matter of days.

“3D printing helps us design and build parts and products faster and in ways we previously couldn’t,” said Kevin Quinn, GM director of additive design and manufacturing. “It’s already having a positive impact on how we develop and build vehicles, like Corvette, and it’s allowed us to apply our mass production expertise to medical supplies and devices.”

The first time a physical version of the mid-engine Corvette came together, 75% of the parts were 3D printed. No other GM slow build design and engineering evaluation has featured this amount or level of detail in terms of its 3D-printed components. This allowed the team to envision what a production vehicle would look like and how all the parts would fit together. They were also able to diagnose and correct issues early on, reducing development time.

GM’s expertise in additive manufacturing in turn enabled the company to quickly shift from its core automotive business to medical production.

“We could not have responded to the coronavirus as quickly as we did without 3D printing,” said Ron Daul, GM director of additive manufacturing. “The investment in both our additive manufacturing facilities and training the team to leverage 3D printing for development has enabled us to pivot to making ventilators and personal protective equipment virtually overnight.”

To produce medical supplies, the team applied additive manufacturing to three core areas: manufacturing, prototyping and production.

Manufacturing

Nearly all tools used to assemble the ventilators that GM is manufacturing with its partner Ventec Life Systems and collaborator Hamilton Medical are 3D printed.

Most are 3D-printed nests or fixtures that hold parts in place during assembly at GM’s facility in Kokomo, Indiana, as well as Hamilton Medical’s plant in Reno, Nevada. These nests are reverse engineered from part data received fromVentec in Seattle and Hamilton in Switzerland.

“3D printing allows us to make constant, rapid changes to fixtures based on feedback from the assembly teams,” said Dominick Lentine, GM senior manufacturing engineer, additive applications. “We can receive feedback from Hamilton, improve a part, and have it flown back to Reno in less than 24 hours.”

To increase the speed of response even further, teams from GM’s Additive Innovation Lab and Additive Industrialization Center, both in Warren, Michigan, recently delivered and installed 3D printers from their respective facilities to the Kokomo plant to print new hand tools onsite.

Prototyping

GM has been using additive manufacturing for rapid prototyping since 1989. The role 3D printing played in the development of the mid-engine Corvette will only accelerate with each new model the company introduces.

This institutional knowledge of 3D printing allowed GM to quickly build and assess different designs of assembly tools mentioned above. It also helped the company develop and produce face shields for first responders.

Seeing a dire need for face shields at local hospitals, GM’s additive manufacturing team started with an open-source design that originated with desktop 3D-printer manufacturer Prusa Research. The team quickly delivered prototypes to local healthcare workers and from there, made three crucial improvements based on healthcare workers’ feedback before producing face shields in large quantities.

Production

GM then 3D printed parts for more than 17,000 high-quality, comfortable, latex-free face shields. In many cases, the teams printing the face shield components were also delivering these shields to local hospitals.

Simultaneously, the team sent the final design to be mass-produced using injection molding. Since the final design went into full production, GM has produced more than 250,000 face shields.

More recently, GM has been 3D printing ear savers that may make protective masks more comfortable for certain wearers. As with face shield production, additive manufacturing helped GM’s team develop, refine and distribute a design before industrializing production of the ear savers on a wider scale.

Expanding 3D printing

GM’s extensive use of 3D printing for medical equipment was enabled by recent investments in additive manufacturing, including two all-new facilities in Warren.

The Additive Innovation Lab, which opened last year, is a 4,000ft² facility in the heart of the Cole Engineering Center, inside GM’s Global Technical Center in Warren. Easily accessible to tens of thousands of employees, GM’s engineers, designers and other team members can learn how to operate the 3D printers and software, convert files into physical parts and then process these parts. To date, more than 700 employees have been trained by the facility’s combined salaried and hourly workforce.

“Most design work takes place in computer-aided design or computer-aided engineering these days, but there’s no substitute for having an actual part in hand to prove out your concept, be it a transmission component or a face shield visor,” said Quinn.

As seen in the production of medical devices and personal protective equipment, 3D printing provides benefits such as:

• Rapid creation of physical parts
• Testing fit or function of parts ahead of production
• Saving time in overall development process
• Saving on tooling costs, which can be prohibitively expensive, as some actual production molds and dies can be 3D printed
• Rapidly check viability of different versions of the same part – multiple iterations of one design can be printed on a single build – which saves considerable time during the development phase
• Gauging early in development how well a single part interacts with its surrounding environment
• Checking tactile feel of different materials and forms

A second greenfield facility, the Additive Industrialization Center, will begin official operations in late 2020 onsite at GM’s Global Technical Center. The stand-alone facility will further expand GM’s expertise and capability in 3D printing and additive manufacturing.

Disposable protective nasal-and-mouth masks are in short supply, but a manufacturing system from Swiss company Mikron could help fix this. The scalable system produces 50 to 100 face masks per minute, depending on the version. With engineering support from Festo, Mikron developed the system in just six weeks.

Mikron’s system fits in a 20ft shipping container which can also act as a clean room. The factory in a box could be located in front of a hospital, next to a shopping center, or near a school. The integrated air-conditioning system with air purification filters makes production possible even in places with high risk of viral contamination. With adequate raw materials, the system can operate autonomously for more than two hours.

“This reduces the number of people required to operate the system, and as a result, lowers the risk of infection,” explains Nils Rödel, general manager of Mikron Berlin. “The mini factory can produce protective masks in remote areas or even in crisis zones where meeting hygiene standards is most challenging.”

Just one system makes it possible to produce two million protective mouth-nose masks each month. The masks are based on meltblown non-woven fabric, which consists of many layers of fine fibers and thus filters out even the smallest particles such as bacteria and viruses from the air.

“Using official statistics, we calculated that medical personnel in Germany alone need at least 50 million disposable protective mouth-nose masks per month,” Rödel reports. “We could meet this demand with 25 containers.”

Eliminating the need for transport makes the end product less costly. The system, depending on how it is configured, can make packs of ten masks or individual ones, shrink-wrapped for cleanliness and packaged in printed bags and boxes if required.

“Packaging masks involves docking an automated station developed by pi4 robotics GmbH, Berlin, a project partner,” Rödel says.

Reliable supply of system components

Electric and pneumatic components from Festo ensure reliable transport, clamping, unwinding, shaping, and folding of the non-woven fabric. An ultrasonic sealing station seals the edges. The servo drives CMMT from Festo for controlling the electric drives EMMT are used in the application because they can be easily connected to programmable logic controllers (PLCs) from major manufacturers, including Beckhoff, Siemens, and Rockwell.

© Mikron | www.mikron.com

Pneumatic components from the Festo core product range installed in the system – such as the compact cylinder ADN, guided drive DFM, and round cylinder DSNU – are in stock worldwide and available for shipment within 24 hours. Global availability enables quick and reliable manufacture of systems for producing masks within a condensed timeframe. The pneumatic drives are actuated by MPA valves, and the safety valve MS6-SV-E ensures that safety-critical system components are exhausted and de-energized as quickly as possible in the event of a sudden emergency stop.

Thanks to its international production and sales network, products from Festo are available in 176 countries and enable systems to be built at locations around the world. This is entirely in keeping with the global open-source approach of Project CAROLA, which provided the impetus for designing the mask production system in a shipping container.

“The current travel restrictions make it extremely difficult for commissioning technicians to go where the systems are to be built,” Rödel says. “Mikron came up with a digitized solution. We use Microsoft HoloLens, which enables commissioning to be done virtually using an interactive 3D projection.”

See the mini factory at work here. 

If you're taking the time to read my blog this weekend then I hope you take the time to register for this great webinar and hear Lisa's perspective and insights as we emerge from shut-downs and make plans to move forward. We bring insightful, educational webinars to you, our subscribers, covering the latest topics and issues manufacturing may face. Is there something you want to know more about? Drop me a line and let me know what interests you.

As destructive as COVID-19 has been, from a supply chain perspective it’s simply the latest disruption manufacturers must face. Lisa Anderson, MBA, CSCP, CLTD, president of LMA Consulting Group Inc., will address these disruptions and explain how manufacturing and supply chain executives can successfully navigate this latest challenge in the free webinar, Future-Proofing Manufacturing & the Supply Chain, taking place June 25, 2020 at 1 pm EDT.

Customers’ expectations are newly defined and ever-changing. The un-normal that’s emerging requires rapid customized products and services arriving at a customers’ doorstep prior to them realizing the need. Is your manufacturing and supply chain network geared to surpass customers’ expectations and prepared to be resilient to ever-changing conditions while growing profit and accelerating cash flow?

In this webinar, Anderson will discuss strategies to navigate, successfully emerge, and position your company to thrive post COVID-19. Attendees will be walked through key insights and proactive approaches to consider across the end-to-end supply chain, as well as strategy and tactics across all organizational functions.

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