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manufacturability, and incorporate
industrial design styling
elements. The arm assy supports the
System 500 Blood Gas Monitor which is used to sense blood gas
parameters during open heart surgery. The arm attaches to a vertical
pole, integral with the heart-lung machine. It allows the perfusionist
to adjust the viewing angle of the Monitor for ease of use while
seated at the heart-lung machine.
After a review of aluminum
casting technologies, it was decided that a sand casting approach was
the best choice for the main arm piece. This process was cost
effective for the production plan of 2000 assemblies, would provide
sufficient dimensional accuracy, and would allow for the incorporation
of softly curved surfaces suggested by the client's industrial
designer. Working with input from a casting vendor and the industrial
designer, Piton created a cast part design that required minimal
secondary machining and could be sanded and painted to a level
consistant with surgery center equipment.
The three knobs, key appearance
features, were redesigned to be made from a single custom extrusion.
The clamp pad was also redesigned as an extruded part. The upper and
lower acetal cylinders were turned into a single part, used twice. The
Monitor tray was resized to be made from stock sheetmetal. A lead-in
cone, needed to guide the Monitor onto the tray, was kept as a lathed
part, but was converted from a press-in part to a bonded part. This
reduced part and assembly costs. A heavy duty compression spring,
hidden in the tilt/swivel knob, was replaced with a flat wire spring.
This provided the desired friction in the adjustment system but
allowed the use of a lower profile knob.
The successful enhancement of
the arm design, both for ease of manufacture, and aesthetics, led to a
finished product that was up to the standard of the state- of-the-art
Blood Gas Monitor.
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