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The University of Bradford wanted to get involved with
the face shield manufacture,
owing to the lack of PPE
within the shortages within the NHS
and within social care settings.
In common with other institutions, we started
3D printing visors similar to this,
using a design off the internet.
But we soon realised that we were only going to
be capable of producing these at a very low volume,
sort of the order of maybe 100 per day
They’re also quite expensive,
they are not a particularly good quality
and so we started investigating whether we could use
another technique known as injection moulding
to produce these on a much better quality
and a much higher volume.
So the project posed some significant challenges,
not least because demand was so high for
these pieces of equipment,
that we had to get it to market
in the shortest time possible.
This meant that we didn’t have a lot of time
for prototyping.
So what we had to do was look at
existing designs that were out there
in the open source community
that appeared to do a good job
and work to refine those designs to
make them more suitable for a moulding process
and to see if we could include any other
key features that would prove useful.
After a range of creating candidate designs
and 3D printing those designs to see what
worked the best, we were able to then
to take that forward and convert
that into a mouldable model.
This required the use of CAD software
to design the mould tools and also simulation
software to be able to predict
how the process was going to behave
before we actually started to
make the moulds ourselves,
just to give us the confidence that it was going to
process okay on our injection moulding equipment.
Once we were happy that things were
going to perform as we expected
we then sent the mould components to
the workshop where the cavities were
cut to make it ready for use.
We actually produced two mould tools for the project,
one to mould the visor frame
and a second one to produce the flexible strap
that goes around the back of the head.
So both these tools were
produced in very good time,
just a week of manufacturing for each one of
those and these were then verified in
our polymer IRC injection moulding laboratories.
We were happy to report that both
tools worked with the minimum fuss
which validated the simulation results
that we produced earlier.
And we’re happy to report that we’re now in
full production on both of the machines,
producing a component roughly every 30 seconds.
Overall, we’re very happy with the design,
we’ve produced something that’s very, very low cost,
it’s very sterilisable,
it’s easy to recycle and it also offers a few
features that other visor systems
don’t have at the moment.
So it’s a very, very comfortable device to wear,
it’s very, very lightweight
and we’ve included additional features
like ear saving hooks,
so when people wear surgical masks,
rather than hooking them around their ears,
they can use the features on the strap
component that goes around the back of the head.
This has been a very good project for the University.
We’ve been able to showcase our
product design skills,
our ability to design for manufacturing processes
that are able to produce parts with very, very high
quality and in high volume amounts.
We’ve worked very closely with local providers
to work through the regulatory process
and we’re really happy that we’ve got a
component that even though it had a
very advanced timescale to bring it to the market,
it’s a high quality component that
offers good value for people who are going to use it.
Injection moulding offers considerable advantages
over 3D printing in terms of the volume of production,
in terms of the quality and the replication
of a design and also in terms of cost.
Additional benefits include reuse of the material,
sterilisation, recyclability
and also the comfort of our particular designs.
In order to get into the NHS supply chain
we needed to pay a lot of attention to
the regulatory frameworks as well,
to the point where we now have a CE mark
which allows us full access into these supply rooms.