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blower controller for covid19 positive pressure helmet (PAPR - PPH)

 

 

About this resource

Our health care heroes simply cannot work from home - they are in the coronavirus/covid19 response first line!

 

At this very moment, there are a lot of community initiatives addressing the challenging tasks of designing equipment as ventilators and positive pressure helmet / powered air purifying respirators (PPH/PAPR).

 

Whatever HEPA or ULPA filters, internal flow repartitions and garments are included in PAPR / PPH design, some major challenges are to assure the minimum of 20 litres / minute of purified air, to maximize the PAPR autonomy and to assure the easiness in control of the ventilated air volume and speed.

 

Starting from minimum flow requirement of 20l/min [1.2m3/h] purified air and tacking a safety range of 2-2.5, I estimate the PAPR flow requirement target of 50l/min [3.0m3/h].

 

I looked around for some compact blowers and I chosen for this test SUNON GB1205PKV1-8AY 12VDC; ~130mA, 50x50x20mm; 9,68 cubic meters per hour. This blower is rated with 1.5W having consumption ~120mA at 12V.

 

As second design criteria, I used the assumption of the usage of 5V power-bank - there are a lot of models available, some of them with storage as 10000mAh or even bigger.

 

Bellow is our humble contribution - one very low cost, but effective design of PAPR / PPH blower flow controller. Intended for usage in conjunction with regular 5V power-bank and with compact, low flow, 12VDC blowers.

 

No Arduino, no RaspberryPI, no sensors, no internet of things - nothing fancy, just a basic and reliable hardware.

 

 

 

Blower controller schema


blower controller for covid19 PAPR, electrical schema v 0.2



 

Blower controller PCB


blower controller for covid19 PAPR, electrical schema v 0.2



 

Blower controller tests


We test the blower controller, AP3032 variant with 10uH/2.2A coil, powered from 5V 1A power bank.

We forced the SUNON GB1205PKV1-8AY blower up to 16.3V, having HEPA filter simulated by thick cotton pads. Maximum acquired flow is estimated at about 65-70l/min. and can be controlled to smaller flow very smoothly.

Measured blower maximum consumption was around 150mA and controller efficiency between 82-86%.

Preliminary flow controller test (see cigarette smoke filtering - flow related), powered from LiPO battery, video here.

All those will be measured and tested, in real environment (PAPR helmet + blower 3D printed casing + HEPA / ULPA filters), by Pepe Peralta Guerrero from NEMO project / Timisoara, Romania (NEMO PAPR picture gallery here).


Blower controller other resources


Eagle schema and PCB files: here.


 

 

RESOURCES PROVIDED WITHOUT ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY! USE THEM AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Original how to written by Dragos Iosub & itbrainpower.net team

 

 

 

 

document version 1.022 / 2020-04-27 © R&D Software Solutions srl