Ventilator Pressure Sensors
Higher Reliability Ventilators Through Self Aware™ Pressure Sensors
Differential Pressure Sensors – Ventilators
Advanced capabilities made possible with Superior Sensor’s NimbleSense™ architecture
- Industry’s highest performing differential pressure sensors customized with 1ms response times
- Capability to second source competing sensor’s analog and digital interfaces while improving performance
- Field proven, highly reliable solutions shipping to industry leading customers in markets worldwide
Contact us to discuss your ventilator project
Superior Technology for Ventilators
Ventilators Require the Highest Reliability
The Ventilator industry manufactures the industry’s highest reliability products with appropriate features offered at acceptable cost levels. Increased system reliability obtained by identifying and replacing sensors, prior to failure, has been shown to lower system alarm rates which saves lives.
We are working closely today with a group of Ventilator manufacturers to define and develop break-through technology focused on dramatically lowering system alarm rates during critical care therapy cycles.
Medical ventilators are sophisticated mechanical ventilation systems designed to move breathable air into and out of the lungs for patients physically unable to breathe on their own. Today’s systems are electronically controlled through embedded processing to tightly manage air pressure and flow characteristics to meet individual patient requirements. These systems are considered life critical as system failures may result in serious harm to the patient. As such, these mechanical ventilators are carefully designed to ensure single points of failure do not harm patients.
Recommended NimbleSense Features for Ventilators
One device can support up to 8 different pressure ranges, and each pressure range is factory calibrated and optimized ensuring no degradation in a total error band, accuracy or stability regardless of the range selected. This eliminates the complexity and headaches of working with multiple sensors.
Instead of having to research, purchase and design-in multiple parts, a single Multi-Range part simplifies both the design and manufacturing of a product. Designing in the same part throughout your designs is much more efficient than having to select multiple components. When you design in each of the Superior Sensor differential pressure sensors, the setting of the pressure is done via a single software command. It’s that simple. Add the fact that there is only one product to inventory, and your manufacturing team will also appreciate the value of Multi-Range!
Benefits of Multi-Range Technology include:
- Design flexibility with ability to ‘tweak’ pressure range throughout development cycle
- Simplified product design with one sensor replacing up to 8 different sensors
- Ability to quickly develop product variants at different pressure ranges without changing hardware design
- Greater economies of scale by purchasing larger quantities of the same product
- Reduced manufacturing complexity and costs due to simplified calibration of sensors
- Up to 8x reduction in sensor inventory costs and product obsolescence
- Allows manufacturers to build fewer product variants, significantly lowering working capital requirements and inventory
Closed Loop Control adds capabilities to set and maintain flow rates via pressure management by directly controlling motors, valves and actuators. Superior Sensors offers the option to have this capability integrated into the sensor in order to more effectively set and maintain flow rates by directly controlling motors, valves and actuators to maintain flow rate targets.
The integrated Closed Loop Control design significantly reduces loop delays in the electronic circuit by up to 100x. This integrated solution also eliminates the need to design and implement a complex control loop system, resulting in more efficient, more reliable and less costly products. Closed Loop Control is of extreme value in medical respiratory devices such as ventilators and CPAP, as well as in air quality measurement products.
The figure below shows a block diagram of an implementation of the Superior Sensor Closed Loop Control for an air quality application. In order to effectively measure the air quality, we require maintaining a constant/known airflow through the viewing window. The differential pressure across the venturi directly measures the flow into this viewing window. The system sets a target pressure level across the venturi and the differential pressure sensor automatically increases or decreases the drive to the pump to maintain the targeted differential pressure, ensuring a constant airflow into the viewing window. This is accomplished with the NimbleSense closed loop circuit used in combination with the company’s proprietary noise filtering, resulting in greater than 100x reduction in loop delay.
Benefits of the integrated Closed Loop Control include:
- Greatly reduce loop delays to improve accuracy and responsiveness of your product
- Improve the reliability of your product by eliminating discrete parts
- Reduce your overall system costs
- Minimize system power and heat
- Simplify your product design
- Speed your time to market
Superior Sensor’s advanced digital filter is a multi-order filter that utilizes advanced filtering capabilities on the front-end of the sub-system to eliminate critical noise created by fans, blowers or other dry air/gas sources prior to reaching the pressure sensing sub-system. The NimbleSense advanced filtering capability removes sensor induced mechanical noise before it becomes an error signal that can adversely impact overall system performance. In customer deployments where our sensor replaced a competing component, we have seen greater than 10x reduction in sensor induced noise, thus greatly improving the SNR of the sensor output. In very low pressure systems, the improvement is even more significant.
Incorporating both standard and optional digital filters, this feature provides significantly better noise reduction and eliminates the need to design an external filtering system, resulting in more efficient, more reliable and less costly products. Our advanced digital filtering is optimized for each application to ensure mixed sampling noise is kept well below the noise floor. By removing the mechanical noise, we maximize overall system performance.
The example below is of a 4th order FIR filter customized to block pump noise above 50 Hz, which has noise of equal magnitude as the signal of interest. The lower graphs show the resulting impact of the advanced digital filtering.
Benefits of the advanced digital filtering technology include:
- Greatly reduced system noise levels by 10x or more, especially important in very low pressure applications. For noise prone systems, an improvement of 100x to 1000x is not unreasonable.
- Eliminate noise sources such as fans and blowers before they reach the pressure sensing sub-system.
- Simplify product design with an integrated approach.
- Speed time to market by not having to design an external filtering system.
With such a high demand for ventilators, it is critical that they continue to work without interruption. Eliminating failures before they become system alarms is a must. Implemented in close collaboration with partners, Superior Sensor’s proprietary Self Aware technology offers a capability that ensures maximum uptime and overall reliability.
Self Aware sensor technology tracks changes in error levels. By being part of a redundant system, the technology both eliminates a single point of failure service interruption and reduces false positives with respect to error notifications. Self Aware can reduce pressure sensor related alarm rates by up to 1000x.
If Self Aware technology is beneficial for your application, please contact us to discuss how we can implement this innovative feature to help differentiate your product.