Make Your own Oxygen Concentrator

The information on this site is for educative and engineering know-how transfer purposes only.

The Information provided on this website is free for use by individual/personal use by DIY enthusiasts and students, not for commercial manufacturing. This will be available for free till the end of Covid-19 pandemic and beyond.

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Oxygen supplementation is one way to help patients who cannot breathe adequately on their own.

A healthy person can achieve about 97% blood oxygen saturation while breathing air, which contains 21% oxygen. The Lungs of a Covid-19 infected patient may not be able to absorb enough oxygen to maintain 95%+ blood oxygen saturation. As a result, oxygen saturation level drops in such patients. To compensate for the reduced capacity of the lungs to absorb oxygen, the purity of oxygen is increased to maintain the blood oxygen saturation, with the same rate of breathing. This is called Oxygen supplementation.

This project describes how to construct an oxygen concentrator with minimal technical requirements. I have done away with Arduino board/Microprocessors and associated coding in this circuit design. Instead, I am using the humble 555 timer and decade counters in the electronic circuit. Attempt has been made to keep the Design as simple as possible, without too much technical complexity. The Oxygen concentrator is intended to support patients at least while waiting for an ambulance or while waiting to get a proper hospital bed with oxygen support. They may be combined with other projects or ventilation systems, according to medical need.

In this design, Pipes and fittings meant for water purifier (both UV and RO type) have been used because of their easy availability and low costs. Since I do not have the resources/capacity to start manufacturing on my own, decided to share it in public domain.

Hope the information provided on this website is useful to people with an indomitable urge to do something during a crisis like Covid-19.

Cycle 1:

When the left hand side solenoid valve is active, compressed air will flow from port P to Port A, and pass through Zeolite Column 1. The flow rates at input to the zeolite column and the flow rate at the output has to be adjusted so that air pressure inside the columns is about 4 bars. This will ensure that almost all nitrogen in the air is trapped by the Zeolite molecular sieves producing nearly 100% pure oxygen. A small portion of the pure oxygen (about 10%) is pushed through zeolite column 2 to flush out any remaining  nitrogen and also to speed up time to pressurize it when it switches to active cycle. Port B to S is the exhaust path.

Cycle 2:

Is same as Cycle 1 except that compressed air is pushed from port P to Port B and then to Zeolite Column 2. Ports A to R is the exhaust path.ur clients' expectations.