Siemens Visit

Siemens have kindly been supporting the Xtreme Everest team by providing Blood Gas Machines for our research since 2006. World leaders in Blood Gas technologies, their machines have performed flawlessly on all of our expeditions and have never faulted us. The Xtreme Everest expedition in 2007 even booted up one of their machines and obtained valuable data from it at Camp 2 on Everest (6600m above sea level).

Expedition Leader - Dan Martin, along with Deputy Research Leaders - Tom Adams and Adam Sheperdigian, and Logistics Coordinator - Brad Jarvis, were invited to the Siemens plant in Sudbury on 8th November to discover the ins and outs of their blood gas machines.

Met by Kevin Sheldrake - Senior Global Service and Support Engineer, and Steve Carey - Support Team Leader, the XE2 team were lucky enough to be shown the evolution of blood gas machines over the many years they have been produced by Siemens and the advances in the technology behind them.

The team were presented with two of the newest cutting edge models, the Siemens RapidPoint 500 Blood Gas Analysers and a re-introduced RapidLab 348EX Blood Gas System. The team learned how the technical advances in these machines over the years would benefit our research (especially the RapidPoint 500 system).

In addition to meeting Kevin and Steve, the XE2 team had the pleasure of meeting some of the manufacturing workforce over lunch and were then taken on tours of the production lines in the factories by these members of Siemens staff.

The team were lucky enough to observe the highly skilled manufacturing team carrying out the remarkably labour intensive production of the machines and after seeing the amount of time and care put into constructing each component (the majority of which are hand-built), it is no wonder that on previous expeditions the Siemens ABG machines have been so dependable.

The detailed explanation and demonstration of how RapidPoint and RaidLab systems are built, along with the hands-on experience in building the machines ourselves, gave us a much greater insight to the inner workings of the machines and into how to adapt and care for them in the harsh environments we test in.

Have a look at the picture gallery below to see us in action at the Siemens Sudbury plant.