Forerunner3D & Covid-19
To say the month of April 2020 has been a weird one at Forerunner 3D Printing would be an understatement. By the end of March the great COVID-19 lockdown was solidly in place and it was time to start figuring out what we could do as a company to help out. We are somewhat unique as a 3D printing company in that we have Laser Scanning / Reverse Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Additive Manufacturing all under one roof. For this reason, we made the decision to forgo immediately starting to work on the large PPE (personal protective equipment) projects that were beginning to pick up momentum. Instead we focused our efforts on other issues we were well positioned to execute on quickly, mainly, stopgap air filters for ventilators to start.
When a patient is on a ventilator there are 2 in line air filters that must be changed every 24 hours. Spectrum Health was worried that if their hospitals got the same spike in patients that were seen in the Detroit area that there 90 day supply of filters would rapidly drop to a few days. F3DP along with several other companies stepped up to work as a team on a solution to this supply chain problem. The first step of the project was to get a 3D CT scan of the existing filter and then reverse engineer it. At the same time Bissell (another AMPWM member company) was working to figure out what kind of filter material was in use in the device an find a HEPA material that could be sourced locally and used in its place.
After the CT scan was complete, we were able to rapidly reverse engineer the outer housing and begin redesigning it to be additively manufactured on our HP MJF 4200 in Nylon 12 (which had just received emergency FDA approval for ventilator splitters). At the time of this writing we have a working design and are awaiting air filter test results in order to cross over a HEPA material for the stopgap filters.
At the same time the filter was in development we were also installing a new processing station for our MJF operation so we would be able to start running a Lubrizol TPU rubber in our MJF machine. The timing on this worked out perfectly as the week we commissioned the machine we got a request from a group on the east side of Michigan to begin printing NIH stopgap masks in TPU rubber. They had been printing these masks in PA-12 Nylon but due to the ridgid nature of the material it did not form an airtight seal around the users face and also would rub the users face raw if worn for extended periods. The TPU rubber material solved both of these issues for the customer and the healthcare providers he was sourcing them for.
As we start to move toward reopening the US economy and getting people back to work, we are now seeing our workload refocus to designing and building tools and equipment to support safe and healthy work environments. One of these projects is producing end use parts for GP Reeves industrial hand sanitizer station (there are 2 MJF parts in every assembly). The choice to go with Nylon 12 MJF parts over traditionally CNC machined components was driven by having complete feature design freedom, the nylon being impervious to hand sanitizer, and the cost-effective nature of the MJF process to produce parts at scale.
Like I said at the top, it’s been a weird month, but we are happy to have been able to play a small part in helping to protect doctors, nurses, patients, factory workers, and everyday people during the great lockdown of 2020.