Mechanical and Electrical Specifications of the Active Lung Simulator i-Lung – Development of i-Lung 1.0 to i-Lung 2.0

Lung simulators are important for different application fields like respirator manufacturing processes, teaching purposes as well as environmental and analytical aerosol transport measurements. State-of-the-art lung simulators have a great disadvantage of not taking the internal structure of the human lung into account. Furthermore it is not possible to simulate aerosol exposition to these lung equivalents. To overcome these restrictions and disadvantages, the i-Lung has been developed primarily as an active lung simulator, which can also be used as a passive lung simulator. With the i-Lung it is possible to simulate physiological and pathological breathing patterns with different lung equivalents like latex bags, primed porcine lungs or even fresh porcine lungs. The presented versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the i-Lung are compared in the mechanical and electrical setup. As a development of the i-Lung 1.0, the i-Lung 2.0 provides a refined mechanical construction, more flexible fields of application and an interchangeable dual control unit. The control unit of the lung simulator is either an integrated single based computer (SBC) or the NI cRIO system. With the cRIO control unit, the i-Lung 2.0 is able to perform real time data transmission. Due to the further developments and improvements of the i-Lung system, more physiological and realistic breathing simulation can be executed with the i-Lung 2.0. Thus, the developed lung simulator becomes a real alternative to animal testing. This can be especially interesting for the cosmetic industry, as animal testing has been banned within the EU for the hazardousness and toxicity tests of cosmetic products since March 11th 2013.