REALIZATION OF A HIGH-PERFORMANCE OXYGEN CONCENTRATOR SYSTEM WITH ON-LINE MONITORING AND OFF-LINE REPORTING ABILITIES

Abstract

This study presents the design and implementation of a high-performance oxygen concentrator (OC) system that can continuously monitor its own operating parameters and report information about the status of the system and patients off-line. In the designed system, the functions related to oxygen production, monitoring facilities, and reporting facilities are performed by its two basic sections: hardware and software. Hardware section is an apparatus supplying oxygen at the required purity, informing patients about the operating parameters of device through a visual display, and periodically saving these parameters to a memory card. In this section, in order to achieve a high-purity oxygen from the system output, a new structure based on the principle of equal pressure application to the surface of molecular sieves is used in the absorption columns of OC apparatus. Software section is an interface program that saves the patient and device information in the memory card into the database, and also allows doctors and technical services to make an assessment and report by using this information. Experimental results show that the proposed system produces oxygen at high purity for flow rates of 1–5 l/min.