ventilator assembly

Last crawled date: 1 year, 9 months ago

a mechanical ventilator is an automatic machine designed to provide all or part of the work the body must do to move gas into and out of the lungs. the act of moving air into and out of the lungs is called breathing, or, more formally, ventilation. the simplest mechanical device we could devise to assist a person’s breathing would be a hand-driven, syringe-type pump that is fitted to the person’s mouth and nose using a mask. a variation of this is the self-inflating, elastic resuscitation bag. both of these require one-way valve arrangements to cause air to flow from the device into the lungs when the device is compressed, and out from the lungs to the atmosphere as the device is expanded. these arrangements are not automatic, requiring an operator to supply the energy to push the gas into the lungs through the mouth and nose. thus, such devices are not considered mechanical ventilators.