Throughout the pandemic, there have been widely reported PPE shortages, and businesses and organizations around the world have been working hard to address them.
One of the most widely required pieces of safety equipment for medical professionals is the face shield: a covering that keeps potentially infectious materials from the entirety of the face, not just the mouth and nose. They are critically important, experts say, because they often provide a second layer of protection and can also typically be washed and reused.
And while companies like Stratasys have used their core competency of 3D printing to produce face shields, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is taking a different approach: a redesign.
The new design is made with a single piece of plastic and cut with a laser die cutter in a way engineering professor Martin Culpepper likens to baking cookies. A single machine can cut a thousand shields per day and the final piece can fold, allowing for the equipment to be stacked and shipped in mass quantities. Culpepper says an instruction sheet is included, directing medical staff on how to fold the sheets to fit their faces.
One of the key benefits, besides their ability to be mass-produced, is that the flat configuration in which they arrive allows hospitals to store many more in-house than they could previously.