Community-driven PPE production using additive manufacturing during the COVID-19 pandemic: Survey and lessons learned

Abstract

This study presents a detailed analysis of the production efforts for personal protective equipment in makerspaces and informal production spaces (i.e., community-driven efforts) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The focus of this study is on additive manufacturing (also known as 3D printing), which was the dominant manufacturing method employed in these production efforts. Production details from a variety of informal production efforts were systematically analyzed to quantify the scale and efficiency of different efforts. Data for this analysis was primarily drawn from detailed survey data from 74 individuals who participated in these different production efforts, as well as from a systematic review of 145 publicly available news stories. This rich dataset enables a comprehensive summary of the community-driven production efforts, with detailed and quantitative comparisons of different efforts. In this study, factors that influenced production efficiency and success were investigated, including choice of PPE designs, production logistics, and additive manufacturing processes employed by makerspaces and universities. From this investigation, several themes emerged including challenges associated with matching production rates to demand, production methods with vastly different production rates, inefficient production due to slow build times and high scrap rates, and difficulty obtaining necessary feedstocks. Despite these challenges, nearly every maker involved in these production efforts categorized their response as successful. Lessons learned and themes derived from this systematic study of these results are compiled and presented to help inform better practices for future community-driven use of additive manufacturing, especially in response to emergencies.

Quality versus emergency: How good were ventilation fittings produced by additive manufacturing to address shortages during the COVID19 pandemic?

“…If further sanitary crises occur, in potential cases of temporary adaptations of this regulation to overcome shortages, our results strongly suggest that strict quality control assessments should be maintained, managed by teams experienced in medical 3D-printing, to eventually obtain formal certification. Choices in printing methods, such as Polyjet for instance, will depend on financial considerations ( Table 4 ), on the background of the 3D-printing engineering teams, and on the volume of material required, including considerations on the conservation and rate of use of the printed devices [ 33 – 39 ].…”

How Digital Twin Concept Supports Internal Transport Systems?—Literature Review

“…As the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic brought up attention, it is worth noting several contexts of the mentioned changes in the working environment (outside the mainstream of this paper). The paper [106] provides a detailed analysis of efforts in the production of personal protective equipment in manufacturing plants and informal production spaces organized by the community in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Manufacturing-assisted plants are more responsive and resilient and will be able to survive unpredictable changes such as the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Where digital meets physical innovation: Reverse salients and the unrealized dreams of3Dprinting

“…Distributed manufacturing is theoretically possible: firms could share production facilities and use service bureaus, while large companies could internally distribute manufacturing across different locations, which would improve sustainability by reducing transport costs (Ford & Despeisse, 2016; Gebler et al, 2014). Yet, we were unable to find in any significant application of this concept, beside the well‐publicized (but brief) production of medical equipment during the first months of the COVID‐19 pandemic (Budinoff et al, 2021; Frazer, 2022).…”