SAIL-BSP develops easy-to-use ventilator with in-house resources

New Delhi: During the current times of Coronavirus (COVID-19) scare, the need for more numbers of ventilators is being felt across the country. Several industrial houses have come forward to manufacture ventilators to fulfil the requirement. If a patient of COVID-19 develops acute breathing problems along with other complications. In such conditions, the patient is put on ventilator support.

Responding to the need of the hour, Central Maintenance department of SAIL's Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) has come forward to develop a prototype of an easy to use ventilator with in-house resources. The working system of the ventilator was demonstrated before SAIL's Director (Projects & BP) and Bhilai Steel Plant's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Anirban Dasgupta, BSP's Director I/c (Medical & Health Services) Dr SK Issar, Plant's ED (Works) BP Singh, Chief General Manager I/c (M&U) Arvind Kumar and other senior officers of the Plant on May Friday. The ventilator developed in-house is now awaiting actual trials in Hospital. Plants' CEO Dasgupta, who formally inaugurated the ventilator congratulated the entire team involved in its development.

A cross-functional team from the Plant's Central Repair & Maintenance (Electrical), Electrical Repair Shop, Electro Techno Laboratory, Instrumentation & INCOS Departments got together under the leadership of Chief General Manager (Electrical) PK Sarkar and came up with the idea of developing an easy to use ventilator with in-house resources.

The team made use of some parts of other equipment to assemble and develop the lightweight ventilator. Considering the criticality of using such medical equipment, several aspects for ensuring the safety of patients have been carefully dealt with. The speed of operation of Ambu-bag of the ventilator is controlled with the help of PLC so that the required volume of air can be pumped in as per the condition of the patient.

Manas Ranjan Rath from CRME, Deepak Jain, Umashankar Badwal, Arup Rai from ETL, Kuntal Baghel, Remi Thomas from ERS, GK Kundu and CS Soni from Instrumentation Department, Tushar Singh from Drawing & Design Department, Harish Sachdev from Machine Shop, Gitanjali Verma from INCOS, Balam Singh from SMS-2, Mohinder and  AK Verma from Maintenance Section of Plant's JLN Hospital & Research Centre all played a key role in developing the ventilator. 

Besides the one developed, the team has also rectified a ventilator lying unused with JLN Hospital. It has also developed another type of ventilator that can be of help for critical patients once it is put to use after actual trials in hospital.