Reverse Engineering Parts Needed for the Medical Covid-19 Response
Written by Victoria Bill, NYU Tandon MakerSpace Director
PAPR Clips
The need:
Last week, NYU Langone medical staff and faculty in the Clinical Engineering department reached out to the MakerSpace through the NYU Covid-19 Task Force about designing replacement parts for powered air purifying respirators (PAPRs). Medical staff wear these hoods as protective devices. There is a clip that holds a facemask in place that can break during the 24 hour, 7 day a week use they are getting. They had a batch of units that were needed urgently but couldn’t be placed into service without this replacement part.
On Monday, the medical team brought us part of the helmet and a few of the original clips to prototype.
I was able to take measurements and send to Gabriella Cammarata, Studio Research Coordinator in the IDM program, who volunteered to design remotely. After a few test prints, we were able to create a prototype that snapped into the helmet.
Over the past two days we were able to print 100+ of these PAPR clips and deliver them to the NYU Langone team.
If you would like to request the STL file, please reach out to us directly at tandon-makerspace@nyu.edu. If you are a medical professional in the NYC area and need similar replacement parts, feel free to reach out to us and we will help if we can!
Ventilator Moisture Trap
The need:
Similarly to the PAPR clips, the NYU Langone team sent me a part called a moisture trap that attached to the Siemens Maquet Servo-I ventilators, shown above. These plastic parts can break as they are attached and detached, and it can be hard for the hospitals to quickly source replacement parts.
Last week, I took measurements and sent to Andy Garcia, graduating senior in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Tandon and a MakerSpace Teaching Assistant. Andy was able to create a model of the part, which I first printed using the Ultimaker 3D printers in the MakerSpace. The original part from the medical team and the 3D printed prototype can be seen above. After sending the initial prototypes to the medical team, we adjusted the design based on feedback and created a final prototype using the Stratasys Objet30 Pro.
We have not yet received final feedback from the medical team on this prototype. If you are working with this machine and are interested in testing out this model please reach out to our team directly at tandon-makerspace@nyu.edu.
We will be updating this blog post with any future edits or updates on this prototype. Please stay home and safe!
