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ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Design and Additive Manufacturing of Medical Face Shield

for Healthcare Workers Battling Coronavirus (COVID-19)

H. Kursat Celik *, Ozkan Kose , Mihaela-Elena Ulmeanu , Allan E. W. Rennie ,
1
2
4
3
Thomas N. Abram , Ibrahim Akinci 1
4
1 Department of Agricultural Machinery and Technology Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, Akdeniz University, Antalya,
Turkey
2 Department of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, Antalya Training and Research Hospital, University of Health Sciences,
Antalya, Turkey
3 Department of Manufacturing, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
4 Department of Engineering, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

Abstract: During the coronavirus disease-19 pandemic, the demand for specific medical equipment such as personal protective
equipment has rapidly exceeded the available supply around the world. Specifically, simple medical equipment such as medical
gloves, aprons, goggles, surgery masks, and medical face shields have become highly in demand in the health-care sector in
the face of this rapidly developing pandemic. This difficult period strengthens the social solidarity to an extent parallel to the
escalation of this pandemic. Education and government institutions, commercial and noncommercial organizations and individual
homemakers have produced specific medical equipment by means of additive manufacturing (AM) technology, which is the
fastest way to create a product, providing their support for urgent demands within the health-care services. Medical face shields
have become a popular item to produce, and many design variations and prototypes have been forthcoming. Although AM
technology can be used to produce several types of noncommercial equipment, this rapid manufacturing approach is limited
by its longer production time as compared to conventional serial/mass production and the high demand. However, most of the
individual designer/maker-based face shields are designed with little appreciation of clinical needs and nonergonomic. They also
lack of professional product design and are not designed according to AM (Design for AM [DfAM]) principles. Consequently,
the production time of up to 4 – 5 h for some products of these designs is needed. Therefore, a lighter, more ergonomic, single
frame medical face shield without extra components to assemble would be useful, especially for individual designers/makers and
noncommercial producers to increase productivity in a shorter timeframe. In this study, a medical face shield that is competitively
lighter, relatively more ergonomic, easy to use, and can be assembled without extra components (such as elastic bands, softening
materials, and clips) was designed. The face shield was produced by AM with a relatively shorter production time. Subsequently,
finite element analysis-based structural design verification was performed, and a three-dimensional (3D) prototype was produced
by an original equipment manufacturer 3D printer (Fused Deposition Modeling). This study demonstrated that an original face
shield design with <10 g material usage per single frame was produced in under 45 min of fabrication time. This research
also provides a useful product DfAM of simple medical equipment such as face shields through advanced engineering design,
simulation, and AM applications as an essential approach to battling coronavirus-like viral pandemics.

Keywords: Medical face shield, Personal protective equipment, Product design, Additive manufacturing, Coronavirus disease-19

*Corresponding Author: H. Kursat Celik, Department of Agricultural Machinery and Technology Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, Akdeniz
University, 07070, Antalya, Turkey; hkcelik@akdeniz.edu.tr

Received: May 29, 2020; Accepted: June 24, 2020; Published Online: August 10, 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Section: Research and Applications of 3D Printing and Bioprinting for Covid-19)
Citation: Celik HK, Kose O, Ulmeanu ME, et al., 2020, Design and Additive Manufacturing of Medical Face Shield for
Healthcare Workers Battling Coronavirus (COVID-19), Int J Bioprint, 6(4): 286. DOI: 10.18063/ijb.v6i4.286.

© 2020 Celik, et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
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