How Formula One expertise is helping ventilator production

Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE), a company spun off from the Williams Formula One team, is a member of the VentilatorChallengeUK Consortium that brings together other F1 teams as well as Ford and aerospace companies to ramp up production of medical ventilators for the patients that have the COVID-19 respiratory disease. WAE Managing Director Craig Wilson talked about how a company that designs and builds cars can redesign a ventilator for mass production. He spoke with Automotive News Europe correspondent Nick Gibbs.

What is the crossover between automotive engineering and improving ventilators?
It's all engineering. Frank Williams [Williams F1 founder] used this expression: 'We are an engineering company that just happens to go racing.' We are a motivated group of talented engineers constantly driven to solve problems. If you want to be challenged in engineering, you go into something that is truly competitive such as putting rockets in space or trying to win a motor race at the highest level.

This an existing machine but you’re making prototypes. Don’t existing blueprints already exist?
There is a lot of talk about ventilators but not a lot of additional ventilators are getting manufactured. This was one of the areas the VentilatorChallengeUK Consortium looked at: was there an existing ventilator that could lend itself with a bit of reengineering to be rapidly scaled for production? They identified an existing model from Smiths Medical.

Why go with an existing design?
Ventilators are very important right now and you have to have absolute quality assurance. There have been ideas kicking around new ventilators, but there's been no certification for them. A unit planned by Dyson has been taking up airtime, but it's a brand-new unit that has had no testing, no field trials and no certification. This is why we felt best way to support was to scale-up existing proven ventilators.

How many ventilators do Smiths normally produce?
Currently about 50 units a month, but it needed to be quickly scaled into thousands on five different assembly lines run by UK aerospace companies [including GKN Aerospace, Meggitt and BAE Systems]. They are aiming to produce 300-500 per line in the first month, with one line able to make around double that. The supply chain is gearing to produce beginning April 6.

How did you help scale production?
A lot of the components of the unit didn't exist in 3-D CAD [computer aided design] drawings, which was needed to produce multiple tooling options to produce more parts quickly. So we reverse engineered the unit very quickly so we could scale up tooling supply chain for the various components. We were also able to make small improvements to help scale up manufacturing. We also needed to put all that into a more regular form of work Bill of Material [BoM -- a list of parts and fitting instructions] so it could be shared among different aerospace consortium members to do the assembly. Effectively we have taken this unit from a low-volume supply state to high-volume supply state in just 10 days.

Wasn't a bill of materials already available?
No. It was a little bit like: 'Joe knows that and Bob knows that'. We're trying put that into five different volume assembly areas with people who haven't had that experience so they've got to have a guide. When you're going from one existing line producing 50 a month, into thousands across five different assembly lines, you need to have complete accuracy.

Are all parts unique or are some off-the-shelf?
Mainly the electronics are off-the-shelf. It's the plastic elements that weren't.

Why were aerospace companies uniquely able to build these and not automotive firms?
It's similar to their volume range and they felt they had ability to doing something quickly. An automotive player typically makes hundreds of thousands.

What the about the motorsports companies?
Only McLaren also worked on this particular project. Like us they have helped test the units on these new assembly lines. Our Williams F1 engineering team has also supported with some of the reverse engineering activities, meaning prototyping a part, building that prototype and testing it.

Is your job now done?
We continue to take on more. Our original role was to do reverse engineering, then we realized we could also support the prototype build and we also volunteered to build the test equipment and test units. So we are probably staying involved until such time every assembly line is in place and the ventilators are being made at volume.

How does it work in terms of payment?
We assume we will have our costs covered [by the government] but that will be it. That wasn't even our priority, we just wanted to help.