Experimental and Numerical Study of Flow Through Ventilator Splitter

Mechanical ventilation is a technique in which the air and oxygen mixture is pumped into the lungs of patients who have low levels of oxygen and are unable to breathe on their own. During emergencies such as an outbreak like COVID-19, hospitals run short of ventilator devices to meet the growing number of patients who require ventilator support. In such cases, a single ventilator device shall be used to ventilate multiple patients using a flow splitter. This study aims to analyse the hydrodynamics of flow through various splitters for two patients having the same compliance and requiring equal flow rates. For the analysis a 3D Y-Splitter having split angle over a range of 30–180° is designed with an inlet diameter of 21.8 mm splitting into two exit arms each of 19 mm based on the ventilator dimensions available at Meenakshi Hospital, Thanjavur. A transient 3D models are simulated for a range of inlet mass flow rates in ANSYS 2019 R1, and the best splitter with equal outlet mass flow rate is identified. The results are validated experimentally under similar flow conditions.