The Spanish Martorell facility that produces the new Seat Leon has been transformed to manufacture automated ventilators for local healthcare authorities to help battle the global pandemic.
“The motivation of everyone participating in this project is that with our know-how we can mass-produce equipment that will save lives”, explained Nicolás Mora from the Production team at Seat Martorell.
The team of engineers designed a total of 13 different prototypes before the final design was agreed upon. The team is now testing the ventilators in collaboration with the local healthcare authority to get approval for mass production to support the fight again COVID-19.
The ventilator is taking shape with printed gears, gearbox shafts from the El Prat production facility and the adapted motor of a windscreen wiper. Each ventilator has more than 80 electronic and mechanical components and undergoes a thorough quality control with ultraviolet light sterilisation.
The ventilators were designed in collaboration with Protofy.XYZ. The factory will bring together 150 employees from different areas, adapting their usual workstation.
“Taking an assembly line that manufactures subframes, a car part, and adapting it to make ventilators has been a lengthy, difficult job involving many areas of the company, and we managed to do it in the record time of one week”, said Sergio Arreciado, part of Seat’s Process Engineering.
The project was made possible by a collaboration of manufacturing employees, and working in partnership with several charities and companies, in particular the Spanish Agency of Medicines and Healthcare Products.
Seat has thanked Bosch, CMCiB, Doga Motors, Ficosa, ISINEO, LCOE, Luz Negra, Protofy.XYZ, Recam Laser, Secartys and the University of Barcelona.
