Architects and engineers are 3D printing medical gear during pandemic

“We reached out to everyone we knew with 3D printers and we grabbed all the 3D printers we could [from campus]... ” Petersen says over the phone, “It really took off from there. Over the course of the sixty hours we’ve been working on this, we’ve multiplied from three volunteers to more than fifty volunteers, from five 3D printers to 106 3D printers. ” Production escalated quickly after the school’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning, which houses many of the university’s 3D printers, got involved, Petersen says.

In an email to AAP students on Wednesday morning, associate dean, Jenny Sabin, announced that the college would be dedicating printers and resources to the cause and asked for those with 3D printers at home and extra filament left over from the semester to donate their time and materials to producing the visors, citing an estimated need of 50,000 visors a day in New York City. Facial shields have been incorporated into PPE for frontline healthcare workers as a precaution against respiratory droplets that transmit the virus. The shields being produced by Cornell faculty and students consist of a plastic visor piece that is worn across the forehead and a sheet of disposable polyethylene, which Sabin and her team have been laser cutting in the university’s digital fabrication lab. Many students, caught within the strange limbo of a closed campus and a university transitioning to online instruction, volunteered to print the visor pieces from home.

For Jesus Luna, a graduate student in the architecture department who has been crowdsourcing materials from his fellow students, 3D printing is a small way to combat the sense of helplessness incited by the pandemic, “These are trying times, we all should be trying to help in any way we can. It seems that our field [architecture] is not useful in this time of crisis, so doing what little I can feels necessary. ” “I’ve printed 15 visors today,” says Manying Chen, a fifth-year undergraduate architecture student, “Each one takes about 70 minutes, I’ve started doing it as soon as I wake up, it’s pretty easy. ” Chen, who lives in Beijing, is one of many international students who have remained in Ithaca, unable to return to their home countries after the campus closed.

The speed with which people around the world have been able to print visors is rooted in the open-source ethos of 3D printing, where makers are able to easily collaborate on and edit 3D files. This accessibility, however, has some worried about whether this informal PPE supply chain is turning out products that are good quality, and will keep health care workers safe. According to Petersen, the visors that are printed by Cornell faculty and students are from a 3D model file approved by medical professionals at Weill. The file itself, which was designed and released by 3Dverkstan, a Swedish 3D printing consultancy, has been downloaded over 10,000 times and is being used in over 20 countries, says Erik Cederberg, one of the designers behind the visor.