10.11.2020
Author: Christian Reil, Managing Director, Ingenieurbüro Reil (CR-3D), Cham
Ingenieurbüro Christian Reil builds special machines and manufactures high-performance 3D printing systems for industry and professional applications. In addition to system construction, the company specializes in the development of innovative materials.
Description of the component:
When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out at the beginning of 2020, the Czech company Prusa Research presented a 3D-printed face shield for care workers that was used throughout the Czech Republic and whose print data was available free of charge. CR-3D wanted to follow this example and help protect and support care workers in Germany with free masks. Together with the German Red Cross, a face shield was developed for FFF 3D printing. Here, too, the open source concept was followed and the shield was made freely available to everyone.
Challenges:
At the beginning of the pandemic, protective equipment for nurses and clinical staff was in very short supply and alternatives had to be found. As products such as face shields were rarely produced in Germany at the time and the production of injection molds would have taken a lot of time, additive manufacturing was the optimal technology to be able to act quickly.
Solution:
The biggest challenges were optimizing the printing times, designing the temples for the face shields and integrating the add-on parts such as the visor as easily as possible. All the important design rules for FFF 3D printing had to be taken into account in the additive design of the face shields. The geometry was reduced to the most important functional surfaces, the wall thicknesses were a multiple of the nozzle diameter, and support was avoided in order to use the existing C-Series and I-Series FFF 3D printers as efficiently as possible. Thanks to the simple design and the publication of the data set in all known 3D printing databases, it was possible to enable all owners of a filament printer nationwide to support the production of face shields for the care sector.