Page 15 - Covid 2021 June 2021

INDUSTRY COLLABORATIONS
Emergency options for medical oxygen storage and
alternative mode of oxygen generation – Efforts by Tata
Consulting Engineers Limited (TCE) & Interventions from Office of the PSA
The ongoing pandemic second wave required urgent actions towards enhancing the country's Oxygen generation and distribution capacity. Tata Consulting Engineers Limited (TCE) has made sincere efforts towards contributing to the requirement, focusing on agility, indigenisation aligned to Atmanirbhar Bharat, quality and cost competitiveness.
The second wave of the pandemic is more infectious, causing an increase in oxygen demand for critically ill patients. An extreme urgency was felt to boost up alternative ways of localised medical oxygen generation and bottling. Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) has coordinated these efforts for a broader ecosystem to be aware and leverage these concepts and solutions to mitigate the oxygen crisis, with a sincere aim to benefit various MSME, states, and other central agencies.
The significant efforts taken towards meeting the demand and bridging the supply gap are as follows:
• Conversion of Cylinders such as Co2, CNG, LPG, etc., with suitable precautions, colour- coding and planning for Gaseous Oxygen distribution across the country leveraging the existing LPG bottling and distribution network and using modular COVID units. The concept is under consideration with Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organization (PESO). This is over and above the approvals granted by PESO already related to the conversions of Nitrogen, Inert gas cylinders and LNG tankers for LOX
• Conversion of PSA Nitrogen plant to PSA Oxygen plants: The idea behind the conversion was to leverage existing available infrastructure. This concept was piloted with IIT Bombay and worked with CPCB & CSIR for rollout and scaling up.
• The rollout of an open-source oxygen concentrator design for use by start-ups, entrepreneurs and MSME across India: For Oxygen generation by using such concentrators
• In-house efforts leveraging open-source design were accomplished in five working days, with almost all local parts, with benchmark results of up to 20 LPM with 90-94% Oxygen concentration.
Here is the brief report on efforts taken up by Tata Consulting Engineers Limited (TCE) to meet the demand and enabling last-mile Oxygen distribution and supply chain logistics.
Contact Info: tceconnect@tce.co.in, secy@psa.gov.in
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