CIT 3D Printing face shields
Cork Institute of Technology: 3D Printing face shields for Irish health care workers
The MESSO Research Group, based in the School of Mechanical, Electrical & Process Engineering at CIT, has joined forces with a nationwide consortium to provide high quality face shields to frontline medical professionals. The group used their expertise to identify a design modification to overcome issues with the current design and to help produce an improved product.
MESSO Researchers at Cork Institute of Technology have joined the efforts of the Benchspace consortium with the aim of providing high quality face shields to frontline medical professionals. To date, the group have focused on manufacturing of PLA headbands using 3D printing technology, committing five 3D printers to full time production.
The consortium currently have over 230 printers nationwide and are producing over 1300 face shields per day and have successfully manufactured over 13,000 for the HSE. MESSO staff have produced over 400. Further optimisation of the printing process was also conducted by the group in order to maximise product output while maintaining quality.
The MESSO group in CIT recognised some issues with the current design during in-house physical testing and came up with a design modification. The main issue occurred when HSE staff would put on the visor over their head, the deformation required to get it on to the head would cause stress concentrations in the areas shown in the image below. Numerical modelling was employed to inform a redesign which was shared with the group.
MeSSO have also engaged with HSE procurement who requested a design option for the rapid design and manufacture of single piece visors that could be manufactured by existing medical device companies. MeSSO have developed a design for a single piece visor design, engaging with our extensive network of manufacturing companies throughout Ireland to help review the design and optimised it for their manufacturing processes.
