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ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Using Large-Scale Additive Manufacturing as a Bridge

Manufacturing Process in Response to Shortages in

Personal Protective Equipment during the COVID-19

Outbreak

Elizabeth G. Bishop*, Simon J. Leigh
School of Engineering, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, United Kingdom

Abstract: The global coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic has led to an international shortage of personal protective
equipment (PPE), with traditional supply chains unable to cope with the significant demand leading to critical shortfalls. A
number of open and crowdsourcing initiatives have sought to address this shortfall by producing equipment such as protective
face shields using additive manufacturing techniques such as fused filament fabrication (FFF). This paper reports the process
of designing and manufacturing protective face shields using large-scale additive manufacturing (LSAM) to produce the
major thermoplastic components of the face shield. LSAM offers significant advantages over other additive manufacturing
technologies in bridge manufacturing scenarios as a true transition between prototypes and mass production techniques such
as injection molding. In the context of production of COVID-19 face shields, the ability to produce the optimized components
in under 5 min compared to what would typically take 1 – 2 h using another additive manufacturing technologies meant that
significant production volume could be achieved rapidly with minimal staffing.

Keywords: Additive manufacturing, Three-dimensional printing, Coronavirus disease-19, Coronavirus, Face shield, Personal
protective equipment

*Corresponding Author: Elizabeth G. Bishop, School of Engineering, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, United Kingdom;
E.G.Bishop@warwick.ac.uk
Received: May 14, 2020; Accepted: June 15, 2020; Published Online: September 04, 2020

(This article belongs to the Special Section: Research and Applications of 3D Printing and Bioprinting for COVID-19)
Citation: Bishop EG, Leigh SJ, 2020, Using Large-Scale Additive Manufacturing as a Bridge Manufacturing Process
in Response to Shortages in Personal Protective Equipment during the COVID-19 Outbreak, Int J Bioprint, 6(4):281.
DOI: org/10.18063/ijb.v6i4.281

1 Introduction spread globally, with the spread of coronavirus
disease 2019 (also more commonly known as
In December of 2019, an outbreak of infections COVID-19) reaching the necessary level of
from a novel coronavirus (now named severe
acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 spreading to be classified as a global pandemic
[SARS-Cov-2]) was reported in China . The according to the World Health Organisation
[1]
[4]
class of viruses known as coronaviruses are (WHO) . At the time of writing, it is believed that
responsible for most of the common colds and over 4 million people have been infected globally,
[5]
have often arisen due to transmission from leading to over 278,000 deaths . It has been
animals to humans . Initially focused on Wuhan established that the contagiousness of the disease
[2]
in the Hubei province , the infection has since is higher than previous outbreaks such as SARS
[3]
© 2020 Bishop, et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
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