As the world continues to develop rapid responses to slow the spread of COVID-19, many eyes have been turned to the maker community. On-demand, localized manufacturing made possible through technologies including 3-D printing (additive manufacturing) is helping in stop-gap supply provision for personal protective equipment (PPE) and other needed-now goods.
Alongside major industrial 3-D printing companies — like Carbon, HP, Formlabs, Desktop Metal, Stratasys, and 3D System — coming to the fore of global efforts, is a relatively small company dedicated to desktop 3-D printers. Prusa Research, based in Czechia, is proving itself to be 3-D printing’s city on a hill in terms of pandemic response.
Josef Prusa (second from right) and the Prusa Research team presenting the prototype face shield to ... [+]
In three days, Founder Josef Prusa and his team at Prusa Research designed, prototyped, verified, and began mass production of medical-appropriate face shields with both 3-D printed and laser cut plastic components. Approved by the Czech Ministry of Health — including Minister of Health Adam Vojtech — the face shields moved quickly to field testing, full approval, and large-scale production. They have donated 12,000-plus of the masks throughout Czechia. The design also spread at the speed of the internet, and downloads in the thousands saw the design rapidly disseminated to all corners of the world.
Many makers have been inspired by the quick turnaround of digital design and digital manufacturing to turn their own 3-D printers to use. There are, however, a right way and a lot of wrong ways to go about using 3-D printing to actually be helpful in the face of pandemic.
“It really is incredible. It is just eight days now, and our whole planet, all the 3-D printers are printing face shields. I would never have expected 3-D printing to act so quickly. It is wonderful,” Josef Prusa told me this week in a Skype interview. “I expect in a week or two, traditional supply will kick in for technologies for better manufacturing like injection molding, and then it will take like two weeks to start making them. Until then, the 3-D printing community can make a big impact. Today we will be finishing 20,000 face shields made just by us, basically in just a week. In our small country, it will have a big impact.”
That big impact is not relegated to small countries; the face shield, now on its third iteration, has been downloaded so many times the Prusa team had to turn off their download counter to avoid overloading the servers. “Before we turned it off, the face shield had about 101,000 downloads,” Prusa said.
Among those downloading the design have been individual makers doing what they can for their local communities’ needs as well as large-scale enterprises. This weekend, the University of Michigan approved the Prusa design for its medical equipment donation drive. The Prusa logo is also visible on the face shields that the team at Ford has been creating using its in-house 3-D printer fleet; Ford has announced the intent to produce 75,000 face shields in its first week of such production.
Community members have shared photos of the Prusa face shield in use.
These face shields are a major help in the global scramble for appropriate PPE, which is in short supply. While many 3-D printing efforts first turned to face masks or parts for respirators, many such designs to appear could do more harm than good with a false sense of security or dangerous ineffectiveness. Validating good designs that can be effectively created and provide actual safeguards from the spread of the novel coronavirus is critical. The value of 3-D printing is the ability to fill such needs now, while traditional manufacturing ramps up its response to the mass supplies needed.
Prusa’s team was uniquely positioned to step in to create an effective design. Recently labelled as one of Deloitte’s fastest-growing companies in the EMEA region, around 200,000 Prusa 3-D printers have been shipped worldwide. Prusa Research also maintains expertise in design, offering a repository of 3-D printable design files. Building upon a face shield design they found to improve it for safety and comfort, the Prusa design team went through iterations and verification rounds with the Czech Minister of Health before releasing the file. Turning all of their printers to this one purpose, rather than for 3-D printing parts for new 3-D printers (about 30% of each Prusa 3-D printer is 3-D printed on Prusa 3-D printers; say that three times fast), their in-house print farm of about 600 3-D printer started making 800 shields per day, quickly ramping up to 3,000 per day.
As the design spreads and more 3-D printers around the world are churning out thousands of these face shields, Prusa is making sure to include necessary cautions regarding the production of any PPE to be donated.
“Even though you are quarantined at home it does not mean you are not infected. Any equipment you want to give hospitals, you need to act like you’re infected, and use at least a face mask while around the printers. We know when the print is finished that it is sterile because of the high printing temperatures. When you touch it, you should always put on sterile gloves, or at least use a new plastic bag and grab the part through the plastic bag so there is the least amount of possibility of contaminating the part. Everyone should always consult with the hospital or the people they are giving it to about their production environment so it is safe. Always, they will need to sterilize or disinfect in the hospital before they actually use it,” Prusa cautions.
Prusa Protective Face Shield - RC3
Upping the standards for their design, the Prusa team has worked with labs in Czechia to ensure effectiveness against the exact virus plaguing the world. “They have live COVID cultures,” Prusa explained of the labs, “so we are now testing ways to safely sterilize with this in the field. We should be having some guides and verified tests from the labs in upcoming days so we can guide the community what to do, tell doctors what really works when working with infected patients.”
Educating the community is key for all the homegrown efforts to bring 3-D printers to help. Prusa himself is very active on Twitter, often reaching out when he sees photos of face shields made but just lying on the floor; “I try to send information on how to do it safely,” Prusa says. “Many people we worked with previously with medical facilities, and we have loads of printers around the world, so we have thought about these things, but if you are a maker at home you may not have thought about it before.”
Looking beyond the face shields, the team at Prusa Research is also in early stages of exploring designs for goggles with indirect ventilation. These goggles will require more work before their verification and file release, but represent another step forward in makeable, useful PPE. Prusa Research has also been running contests for other designs outside of safety gear that requires verification, such as “stuff like how to open doors safely without touching the doorknob, or stuff you might run out of if you are at home and cannot go to a shop,” Prusa says.
Preparation has been key to Prusa Research’s approach to the current conditions. Prusa released a blog about why it’s “important to be two steps ahead,” detailing his team’s efforts to operate safely — which have been quite effective, as they have to date had zero cases of COVID-19 among their nearly 500 employees. From turning their polymer lab to making 1,000 liters of sanitizer to requiring thermal temperature checks before coming into work to adding a pause between manufacturing shifts to sterilize the factory, Prusa’s efforts are to be lauded as the company continues to set an example for 3-D printing companies today.
While he is also fighting the potential for normalcy bias in recognizing that relatively severe measures will have to remain in place for some time, and “business as normal” is still quite some ways off, Prusa is keen to look ahead for both his company and the broader 3-D printing industry.
Life after the pandemic won’t look the same, that’s simply a given. But for Prusa Research, preparation is key to moving forward for that new normal. There is also hope to be seen — a silver lining that 3-D printing may step more into the mainstream, and this time without the hype.
“This is a chance for our desktop 3-D community to show as a mature community, not just a bunch of nerds printing toys,” Prusa said with a grin. “For 3-D printing, I think this shows a lot of people that it has a lot of use… This will be a marathon, and I think it might be actually a time for 3-D printers to finally rise because the economics will be cooled down all around the place, I think we can agree on that. And then the 3-D printers are very useful — in right to repair movements, to replace parts, or just to manufacture stuff cheaply, as we have, for example. We have a lot of parts in medical labs. For some uses you have a single-use medical tray that can cost hundreds of euros, but can print it for less. 3-D printing can be very efficient.”
