It was the morning of the Janata Curfew. Ebin Ephrem Elavathingal, senior manager of AIC RAISE (an incubator backed by Government of India under the NITI Aayog Programme); Hari Vigneshwaran, founder of Augment 3Di; and Vigneshwaran S, founder of Virtual Frontier Robotics were watching news on the television. “We understood the gravity of the situation. All of us are engineers and wanted to do something to help. It was then that Vigneshwaran told us about face shields being 3D printed in a lab in Italy,” says Ebin. Over the next three hours, the team researched face shields and searched for designs. “We could not find any open source design and so we decided to develop one ourselves. Vigneshwaran and Hari have 3D printers and we used them for our work. We did the entire discussion and designing over video calls,” he adds,
Their first shield was ready on the same day, but the process took four hours. “So we reworked the design into a simpler one till each mask took an hour to make. In the last few days, we developed 350 masks and donated them to sanitation workers in Coimbatore. It covers the entire face and can be reused after cleaning with soap,” Ebin says. Of the 350 shields, 250 were directly given to Coimbatore Medical College Hospital and ESI Hospital. “The rest was donated to Coimbatore Corporation-South Zone in association with Rathinam Group of Institutions,” he says.
The group posted photographs of the product on their social media pages and soon got requests for the shield from across the country. “Our production capacity was limited and we could not meet the demand. This is when we decided to open-source our design. Now anyone can use our design free of cost to make these shields. All one has to do is feed the memory card with the design into the 3D printing press,” Ebin explains.
Vimala B, Assistant Town Planning Officer, Coimbatore Corporation-South Zone, says that the 100 shields that they received are of great help to the sanitation workers and officers. “This helps them keep their hands off their faces. We have now requested for 50 more,” she says. The team now plans to move into mass production following the surge in demand. “We have made moulds and will follow the traditional manufacturing method. We hope to make 1000 masks a day. We are looking for donors who can support us in this venture. Each mask costs ₹90 to make.” They are now working on a design to 3D print ventilators. “It is a complex design. We have designed 60% of it. We should be done in the next few days. We hope to get a working model soon,” he says.
Call 7708019222 for details.Visit https:// aicraise.com/faceask3dprint/ to download the design
