Weber State and Weber School District create 3D printed protective equipment for first responders, small care facilities | Health Care

These efforts started separately, but they’ve now come together.

In collaboration with the Weber-Morgan Health Department, the Weber County Sheriff’s Office is collecting the masks and shields and distributing them to organizations that have indicated a need.

“Our intent with the (reusable face) mask is to try and get one of those pushed out to every firefighter, paramedic and law enforcement officer in the county as quickly as possible,” said Eli Johnson, who works in Emergency Management and Homeland Security for the Weber County Sheriff’s Office. He is coordinating the distribution of the equipment.

Weber State and Weber School District are the primary contributors, but private individuals have also used their own 3D printers to create and donate masks, Johnson said.

The county’s goal is to distribute 900 masks, Johnson said. By midday Friday, they’d received and distributed 100.

The process of 3D printing can be slow. According to a Weber State press release, each mask takes four hours to print.

There are different types of 3D printers, but one common type “works a lot like a hot glue gun that’s being operated by a robot,” according to the website Digital Trends — although a 3D printer’s “glue gun” is much smaller than an actual one.

A small cylinder of plastic, called filament, is heated and pushed through a tiny nozzle that lays down one layer of the material at a time to create an object, waiting for each layer to dry before laying the next.

These masks are designed to be used with disposable filters, which can be cut from surgical masks, stretching the use of each disposable mask by using less of its material.

Designs for one such mask, called the “Montana Mask,” are available free online, as long as the design is used to provide free masks for those who need them. This mask has not been approved by the FDA, but it has been tested and is in the process of being patented, according to its three creators — two of whom graduated from Utah schools Weber State and Brigham Young University.

Weber School District started printing masks Thursday using eight of its printers, with eight teachers working on the project.

By midweek this week, 15 printers should be in operation, said Rod Belnap, director of career and technical education for the district. With that number of printers, the district estimates that it can produce close to 30 masks a day. Between Thursday and midday Friday, the district had produced 25 masks.

Each mask costs $7 to $8 to produce, Belnap said, and the supplies to make the masks are being paid for by the Weber Education Foundation.

This will likely make a significant dent in the county’s goal over the course of the coming week, according to Johnson.

By the middle of last week, Weber State had produced 85 face shields. These shields cover the entire face of a health professional who needs to get close to patients.

They produced the shields in a matter of days with six 3D printers, two professors, and two student volunteers who have experience with 3D printing. The volunteers stagger their schedules to practice social distancing, according to a Weber State press release.

Health care workers will “be needing to … intubate a patient, where they need to get close, and when they’re doing that, the patient can gag and cough and spit up, so a mask alone is not going to be enough because they’re right over the person,” said Jeff Clements, an assistant professor of management information systems and technologies at the business school who is involved in the project.

Clements teaches a course on 3D printing to business students, without engineering backgrounds, who work with local businesses to create products they need — like designing and printing a pizza peel that’s easier to grip for a local pizzeria.

Clements began making personal protective equipment using his own 3D printer at home before there were many cases of COVID-19 in Utah. He started the project because he saw there was a need for protective equipment across the country, and he thought the same needs might arise in Utah.

Not long after he started testing prototypes, he got a call from his parents, who live in a retirement community in Texas. They told him that people in their community couldn’t get protective equipment, and asked him to make some 3D printed products for them, which he did.

Through that community, Clements learned of another facility in Louisiana that had similar needs.

What started with his own personal contacts grew into conversations with the leadership of the business school, who were looking to make use of their resources to help the community through the pandemic.

“We began thinking ‘What can we do?’” said Matt Mouritsen, dean of Weber State’s Goddard School of Business and Economics. “One conversation led to another, and … before long, multiple (3D printer) labs on campus want to participate, multiple deans are willing to allow their labs to spend some time on this — and then you connect with your community partners, and pretty soon you’re delivering products to the areas of greatest need.”

This 3D printing project is being paid for with funds that have been donated to the business school, without any restrictions being placed on their use, Mouritsen said. No state funds have gone toward the effort, he said.

Both the school district and the university are encountering difficulty obtaining certain supplies for their projects. Clements is looking for “button-hole elastic,” often used in clothing, as well as antimicrobial filament for the 3D printers. Weber School District has also encountered shortages in the elastic that attaches to the face masks.

“We would love to be able to talk to anyone that has either industry contacts … or people that might have that type of stuff around, (and) they don’t realize that it’s something that could be useful right now,” Clements said. “We would love to be able to get people involved with this project.”