VACUUM FORMING – GOLD
Plastique Art, Sainte-Claire, Quebec, Canada
Ventilator
Overview
This enclosure assembly of eight thermoformed parts
houses a high-end intensive care unit ventilator. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, our customer was awarded a contract of 10,000 units to be manufactured urgently.
Features and Benefits
In order to meet the extraordinary challenge of designing and manufacturing an enclosure for a brand-new ventilator in only three weeks with the intention to be production ready after approval, all parts were vacuum formed to provide the best aesthetic and functionality within this short time frame.
The other components of the device being developed simultaneously, daily collaboration with the OEM and designer was required to make recommendations and adjustments while keeping the same deadline. Our focus was to optimize the design for manufacturability while achieving the best fit of the 2 parts, knowing that they had to be thermoformed on male urethane molds which would be then utilized also for production.
The capacity of the supplier to deliver custom color sheets for prototypes under a week and on short notice for mass production was critical to the success of this project.
Assembly of the enclosure has been designed to minimize the attachment points. First, to reduce the time required for the OEM, but also to limit the contact points with the metallic substructure and avoid interferences that should come from unknown tolerance stack-up of all the other components.
By making the tools in-house with a staff fully dedicated to this project, we were able to meet the 10 days lead time for 11 devices ready for certification by a health agency.
Upon final approval of the device, we needed to ramp up the production quickly to make 10,000 devices in under 16 weeks. For this, multi-cavity, temperature controlled, aluminum moulds were required for all parts. Even though they were made quickly, in the meantime we still had to make around 2,000 parts out of urethane tools and maintain consistency throughout the program.
