Vital capacity - the story behind Penlon's ventilator push

Engineers love a challenge. And there are few more striking examples of this appetite in action than the events of April 2020, when teams from almost every corner of the UK’s engineering landscape dropped what they were doing to rapidly work up concepts and designs for urgently needed ventilators.

The offers of help from across the manufacturing spectrum were a humbling reminder of both the importance of engineers at a time of crisis and the UK’s rich pool of engineering talent. But - as previously reported by The Engineer - the push for ventilators quickly coalesced around Ventilator Challenge UK, a consortium of manufacturers which took the sensible decision not to reinvent the wheel, but to scale-up the production of two existing devices: a portable ventilator manufactured by Luton’s Smiths Group and the Prima ESO2, a ventilator design adapted from anaesthesia equipment produced by Oxfordshire medical devices firm Penlon.