Open - Source Low-Cost Vaping Machine for Laboratory Testing of Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems

Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS, vapes, or e-cigarettes) are becoming increasingly popular, gradually replacing traditional cigarettes as a public health concern. ENDS use an electrically heated atomizer to produce an aerosol inhaled by the user. To study vaping patterns of users in real-life settings, we designed Flexible Robust Instrumentation for Electronic Nicotine Delivery System (FRIENDS), an electronic sensor that attaches to the body of an ENDS and monitors the vaping by detecting the changes in a near-field electromagnetic field. This paper describes an electromechanical Vaping Machine for laboratory testing of FRIENDS sensors (VM-FRIENDS) that can produce programmable vaping patterns, providing control of the number of puffs, puff duration, puff flow rate, and inter-puff interval, thus allowing flexible, human-like puffing for experimentation on ENDS devices. The vaping machine was validated in laboratory experiments. In the timing validation, VM-FRIENDS achieved an average error of 1.1% with a standard deviation of 0.5%. For the puff volume validation, an average percentage error of 4.34% was found. The hardware and software of VM-FRIENDS design are publicly available and may be used by other researchers in the field.