Published on: April 9, 2020 by Blair Haas
As I have mentioned in my prior blog, as an electronic enclosure company servicing many infrastructure and related industries, we are an essential company during this Corona Virus era. Given that we manufacture and sell only the box into which these essential products are installed, we often don’t know all of the details about the variety of uses of our products. Through our distribution network, we service tens of thousands of different customers each year with our broad electronic enclosure line, plus the thousands of modifications we do each year. Therefore, it was with a great deal of pride that we learned that one of our products is on the front line of an exciting new product to help fight this horrible virus.
Two mechanical engineers and their team at Auburn University have developed an approach to turn a CPAP machine into a ventilator using one of our NBF series of NEMA rated plastic boxes. As you may know, a CPAP machine is typically used by people with sleep apnea or other similar disorders to wear at night to insure that their breathing stays steady by receiving a steady supply of oxygen. These machines are plentiful and transforming them would ease many of the supply issues on a traditional ventilator. They are in testing on this project to get proper approvals, but it is moving through the process rapidly. Today they posted that they have done animal trials, a required step to gain approval and the machine performed even better than anticipated.
Bud will take our standard box and provide holes and cutouts to allow for the input and output of the air/water tubes, the displays and the various controls. By providing a one-stop resource for this work, they will be able to ramp up their development into a full production run, helping ease the critical shortage of these devices worldwide. The NBF series is perfect for this project because it is all plastic and can easily be cleaned without risk of rust or damaged components.
We are excited to be a part of this project and we appreciate the opportunity to help get our country and the world through this difficult time.
