The students partnered with local businesses and Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and have thus far developed and shipped more than 40,000 3D-printed, N95-quality masks to medical personnel and responders across the state. The students are also producing face shields, phone-booth-like plastic shields and hands-free door openers that can be attached to key chains.
Tim Simpson is the Paul Morrow Professor of Engineering Design and Manufacturing at Penn State, and when his students were forced to move classes online, he looked around for ways to keep them busy. “I saw an article on Italy and the Czech Republic, where people were making 3D-printed masks and face shields,” he said. “I redirected my class around the project there and at the same time started connecting with doctors.”
Simpson and his students were able to find various designs of masks and shields and other PPE online and were able to take those specifications and customize those using the input they got from medical personnel.
“They have feedback like, ‘Yes, it fits well, or can you enlarge the hole,’ those types of things,” Simpson said.
After the students get their design recommendations set, they send off the specifications to a manufacturer that prints it then returns the masks to the students who then assemble them with filtration material from the hospital.
Some of the face shield designs are being tested at Hershey Medical Center and some are already being produced at Actuated Medical Inc., a local research product development company. There are 24 Penn State campuses and 21 of them can print the face shields.
“Of course, the caveat is that you have to comply with guidelines, and we’ve been very mindful of that from the start,” Simpson said. We have to go through the right regulatory pathways, and of course the Food and Drug Administration is now changing guidelines daily, if not hourly, and we have a legal team monitoring that and getting back to us as soon as anything like specifications change.”
The students continue to crank out about a thousand masks per day and other types of equipment, including the clips that help people open doors without touching them with their hands. “That’s another one that’s a design that materialized from a company in Belgium, which had printed out a 3D clip that goes over a door handle and helps you minimize contact with the door,” Simpson said. “So you can use your wrist to open the door rather than touch it with your hands.”
Most of the work has been able to be done by the students at home but certain personnel have had to go into the lab to complete the work.
“The challenge with all of this is Penn State is a research university, we don’t actually make anything,” Simpson said. “And even though we were doing design and development, we’re also reaching out and establishing a supply chain with companies that could help us make and ultimately deliver PPE and other things.”
