Airflow simulation in a UV sterilization chamber of an iPAP ventilator for COVID-19 patients. [Image courtesy of Onshape]
Onshape (Burlington, Mass.) recently added the Moebius Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver to its platform. The new feature was made possible through an exclusive partnership with the Moebius LBM CFD’s creator, Lexma Technology (Arlington, Mass.).
“With Moebius running on OnScale, we were able to optimize the design of our Intelligent Positive Air Pressure (iPAP) machine with UV disinfecting chamber,” ITT CEO Shashi Buluswar said in a news release. “Using OnScale and Moebius to create digital prototypes of our device dramatically shortened our physical prototyping cost and time and allowed us to accelerate our goal of delivering critical iPAP devices to low-income countries to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Adding Moebius represents a democratization of digital design when it comes to creating devices with fluid flows, said Onshape CTO David Freed.
“Moebius running on the massively scalable OnScale Cloud Engineering Simulation platform will break barriers to innovation for a variety of applications such as lab-on-a-chip, MEMS, and medical diagnostic and treatment devices like next-generation ventilators and respirators,” Freed said.
LBM takes a kinetic theory approach to simulating fluid flows, unlike the Navier-Stokes CFD methods which simulate bulk fluid flow. LBM enables the simulation of complex biomedical and engineering problems, including multiphase flows (e.g. simulating control and management of multi-species droplets in microfluidic devices), particle transport (e.g. simulating sorting of blood and cancer tumor cells), and fluid-structure interaction (e.g. simulating efficient micro-scale actuators in MEMS applications), according to Onshape.
In the case of Berkeley, Calif.–based ITT, the new feature on Onshape’s platform aided the design and engineering of a critical aspect of the iPAP device: the UV disinfecting chamber, which is intended to disinfect almost all of the air exhaled from the lungs of a person with COVID-19. The challenge with the disinfecting chamber was to minimize size, cost and heat generated while maximizing the amount of time air spends in it. Moebius running on OnScale enabled many “digital prototypes” of the disinfecting chamber and process so that the ITT team could quickly decide on a winning, manufacturable design.
