Something I have noticed about myself is that I have a very singular focus; I tend to do a lot is devote all my time and focus to analyzing either an idea or an activity, unable to pay attention to other things while this is happening. When I was little I would frequently read books in one sitting, unable to put them down even to go to bed. Although I’ve gotten better at multitasking, this still tends to happen at times. This is sometimes useful; I have been very grateful the night before an organic chemistry exam or before an important presentation. But by redirecting your focus in this way some pretty unanticipated things can happen, often times helping me refocus on the big picture rather than the nitty gritty.

This has been especially applicable for the project, I am currently working on. If you told me right after my previous post that I would continue my initial project, skepticism would be an understatement. I had already begun to internalize what the technicians said and began to focus on other aspects of the concentrator: airflow, ventilation, etc. But what I had ignored was the big picture. Compressors break unnaturally early and something must be causing it. With helpful input from George, a veteran technician employed by the Rice CPAP office for the nationwide implementation of Pumani bCPAP (a low cost medical respiratory device designed to help babies begin breathing), and Matt Petney, the Polytechnic Design Studio director, I was able to refocus on the issue at hand and re-examine the different components that may fail in order to find the problem.

After extensive investigations my partner and I found that the external gross particle filter on oxygen concentrators is wholly inadequate at stopping dust from entering. We ran a battery of tests on the concentrator for this including measuring internal temperatures at different time points, placing concentrators against walls to see if ventilation may be an issue, taking out the compressor and mapping the airflow route of the cooling and compressed air, and of course the extent filtering in the machine. Most of these tests returned normal results except for the filter tests.

In order to test filtering, we designed a airflow detection system and a dust retention system in order to see what types of filtering materials would both allow a lot of airflow into the device and also retain to most amount of dust that can be picked up from the surrounding environment. The airflow test device consisted of two tubes that were separated by a filter with air being pushed across with a fan that could be monitored by a air pressure sensor hooked up to a Arduino processing unit. The dust tension device used a fan in reverse to pull dust from one side of a filter to the other side into a collection container. As expected, the gross particle filter preformed the best at allowing airflow but just as George mentioned it did nothing to stop the dust. (The fan didn’t even be needed to turn on to see this happen). Other materials we had previously acquired were tested as well in order to cover the bases and determine which filter material would be the best should we chose to replace the filter.

But in the meantime we have been sorting through different ideas we had for other ways to solve the problem. After a sorting the weighing the different solutions, we came up with creating a an external filter box which can either passively take in air or actively force air in through the help of another fan attached the the concentrator. Currently we are in the process of making prototypes of these devices to determine which system is better at solving the problem. We will test them over the course of this week; hopefully they will yield positive results.

Besides conceptually reconsidering my project problem statement, this week has also forced me to refocus in a much more concrete (and unfortunate) way. Because of this project, I have been spending my free time trying to learn how to use Inkscape, a free graphics design software, to make containers for the filters as well as brush up on other design software. My computer literally had to die in order to stop me from using Inkscape. Currently I’m typing this blog post on my phone which is an experience I would definitely not recommend. However maybe this unexpected incident will help me rethink the big picture instead of pigeonholing me into designing a filter box. While this is our current avenue of approach we do have other ideas that potentially may be better. Who knows?