OIST Covid-19 Community Response - Face Shields

I’m Amy Shen. I’m a professor leading the Micro-Bio-Nano Fluidics Unit There are several things we believe we can contribute especially with researchers from my unit We’re involved with two very different projects: One is related to using 3D printing to make face shields in collaboration with the Mathematics Mechanics and Materials Unit We teamed up and decided to use the available designs online to use our in-house 3d printers My name is Ankur I am a graduate student in the Shintake unit here at OIST I’m assisting in a project to help print and build face shields for people both at OIST and around Okinawa we’re trying to print 10-12 at a time in stacks so that we can make them really quickly and then rapidly get these face shields out there We typically will be running jobs of maybe 10 to 20 hours to print as many as possible but also to give us a gap to check to make sure the printer works properly and there are no hiccups. If we have full capacity and with the materials, we maybe make 100 to 200 shields a day I’m a physicist so when it comes to these sort of medical crises I never really think that my expertise is very useful in this line of work so I’m glad to help in whatever way I can. We’re very lucky that we have a lot of support from the OIST community to provide these face shields I think that’s something easy we can do especially at OIST we have the hardware and the software we also have the researchers available to contribute I think it’s our responsibility to try the best we can. .