It’s been such an exciting week! Besides visiting Majete Wilderness Reserve and seeing some elephants up close, we finally met the six other interns from the Polytechnic who we will be working with over the next month. Most of them are electrical engineering majors with a few mechanical and telecommunications majors in the mix. They’re such a friendly bunch of people and they have some really interesting projects. One was converting wind energy from moving automobiles into electrical energy. There was even one project with a mechanical self-flushing toilet.

Much of this week was spent as an introduction course to the skills we will be needing in the next few weeks. We spent quite a bit time going through the function of the oxygen concentrator and suction machine. Both devices are quite complicated with many parts but breaking down the functions into the individual parts helped me understand what we were working with. We also reviewed Arduinos and basic programming skills.

We were also introduced to the different projects that we will be working on. I’ve been assigned to work on sieve bed regeneration for oxygen concentrators. The two sieve beds in oxygen concentrators work to trap the nitrogen from the pressurized air that passes through, leaving behind around 90% oxygen that goes to the patient. However, due to moisture that may enter the oxygen concentrator, the sieve beds become damaged and need to be completely taken out and replaced. Spare parts take a long time to wait for which makes regeneration of the zeolite in the sieve beds necessary. There are a few possible designs that may work, both mechanical and electrical. I’m excited to try and figure them out with the two other interns on the team, Nafe and Isaac.