The virus and the ventilator

The call goes out

On 16 March 2020, the UK’s Prime Minister made a direct appeal to British manufacturers to join a huge effort to mass-produce equipment needed for the fight against Covid-19. As part of the Ventilator Challenge UK consortium led by Dick Elsy, CEO of the High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult, the University of Sheffield AMRC Cymru facility was transformed into a production hub for ventilator parts. It was the start of a project that demonstrates the very best of British ingenuity, application and teamwork.

Opened in November 2019, AMRC Cymru is a £20m state-of-the-art research and development centre located in North Wales and funded by the Welsh government. Hailed as a ‘game changer’ for the region’s economy, the facility operates a 2,000 square metre open access research area focusing on advanced manufacturing sectors including aerospace, automotive, nuclear and food.

Airbus is the anchor tenant, and at AMRC Cymru the next generation of manufacturing technologies will be developed as part of the Airbus ‘Wing of Tomorrow’ programme.

At least that was the plan. Then Covid-19 happened.

From game changer to lifesaver

Instead of embarking on projects with the aerospace industry and other partners, in late March 2020, the AMRC Cymru team found themselves stripping out all of their equipment so that Siemens with the support of Microsoft could install eight production lines dedicated to the manufacture of ventilator parts.

But that was only the start. With critical time pressures, the first major hurdle was retraining Airbus’s aerospace engineers to make medical equipment.

The solution was ingenious. The AMRC has been pioneering the use of Microsoft HoloLens technology in industry. These ‘mixed reality’ headsets enable the wearer to see a combination of the real world and interactive holograms. This allowed engineers on the production lines to see every part of the process involved in assembling the ventilators and even talk directly to a remote support engineer while maintaining social distancing.

But, of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Our team had to source 100 headsets at short notice, programme them with the necessary information and arrange for ongoing support to be available around the clock.

Throughout this whole process the spectre of the pandemic complicated things even further. With 500 people working on site, the entire way the factory was set up had to be reconfigured to ensure safe social distancing.

The Covid factor

Where once a single security guard supervised a handful of people entering the open access research facility, now a large team housed in a series of white tents screened the 350 shop floor workers using the building.

A two-stage process meant each engineer had to thoroughly sanitise their hands before having their temperature taken by a thermal imaging camera. Anyone with a temperature above the average of 37.5˚C was not allowed in.

One of the AMRC’s engineers even used discrete-event simulation software to create a digital twin of the proposed factory in order to safely control operator movements around the facility, scheduling shift breaks and lunch times to minimise the risk of contact between operators and to ensure the safety of those working on the shop floor.

Throughout the production period the University of Sheffield’s estates team arranged 24/7 cleaning, security and maintenance cover for the building.

An outstanding effort

This phenomenal undertaking concluded in some genuinely astonishing results. The normal planning process for a project like this would take at least 18 months. The Ventilator Challenge UK team turned it around in four weeks.

The consortium produced more than 13,400 ventilators for the NHS, an order which would have normally taken 10 years to fulfil. They delivered them in 10 weeks. The social distancing measures put in place were so successful they’ve been adopted as best practice by the Welsh Government.

There is no doubt that this has been one of the most important and impressive projects that the University of Sheffield has been involved with in its 115-year history. The sheer level of collaboration and coordination needed to bring 33 UK technology and engineering businesses together on this project is testament to the relentless ‘can-do’ attitude of everyone involved, including those at the AMRC in Sheffield and Wales.

At its best, innovation can power economic growth, drive investment and create jobs. At its very best it can save lives.