I built an apparatus to test a person’s breathing force and lung volume for monitoring COVID symptoms at home. In this semester-long project, our team aimed for the design to be relatively inexpensive, easy to use, and repeatable.
The approach to the project was to use the force of a breath to impact a plate, which would create stagnation pressure. The pressure on the plate would create a force on a beam, which would then deflect. A strain gauge would measure the deflection of the beam and with that, we could calculate the force. With several breaths, we could calculate the volumetric flow rate by evaluating the force over a certain amount of time.
Our final design met all requirements and was consistently accurate.
Details of our design process and selection of materials can be seen in the formal research paper:
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