Sorry for the slow in updates! Recently I’ve been working with the new intern, Graham, on a few projects at 3SD. Most importantly, I’ve been catching him up to speed on all the procedures for maintaining and working with the Pumani units. We received the 3 units back from Rice on Monday, and this was a great time for me to give him an idea of how the unit functions. We opened them up, and I introduced him to the slightly strenuous process of removing and rearranging tubing! These units needed to be updated to the most recent revision, so we had quite a bit of work to do. This included rerouting tubing, updating handles, and installing the exhausts. Graham is great with the shop tools, so he caught on quickly how to put the units together.

After showing him the components, we moved onto testing. I ran Graham through the pressure testing first, both in practice as well as in theory. I showed him a bit of the LabView coding behind the fixture, and we proceeded to test the 3 units we recently retrofitted. Since Pride had shipped the next 18 units down to us, I decided to pull a couple of those units and run some testing on them as well in order to confirm consistency between our results and Pride’s. I had Graham run a few for practice, while I finished them up, confirming that they all passed well within the acceptable thresholds. The oxygen testing that I had mentioned earlier last month was a little more tedious. Working with the oxygen concentrator and detector proved to be significantly less straightforward, and Graham and I took a little more time familiarizing him with the different tests that were necessary. All of these procedures are documented, so I felt confident that he would be able to carry them out after I’ve left. On a side note, I began to think about developing a LabView test fixture to conduct the oxygen testing as well. This would definitely streamline the entire process.