3D-printed respirator valve conceived of in the early days of COVID-19 when hospitalizations were soaring and the supply chain was failing. Credit: Massimo Temporelli’s Facebook.
In the wee hours of Friday, March 13, 2020, physicist Massimo Temporelli received a frantic call from a journalist he knew. She told Temporelli, founder of a digital fabrication lab in Italy, that a hospital in Brescia was running out of the valves used in patients’ respirators and the supplier could not provide them quickly enough to stave off imminent death for some of the patients hospitalized with COVID-19.
Given Temporelli’s expertise, she asked if it was possible to 3D-print the valves instead. Temporelli didn’t know the answer at that moment, but he was going to find out.
After many, many calls and false starts, Temporelli finally connected with Cristian Fracassi, the founder of startup Isinnova. Fracassi’s company was based in Brescia and had a 3D printer, which he agreed to bring directly to the hospital. Within six hours of connecting, Fracassi and colleague Alessandro Ramaioli began manufacturing valves.
By 7:30 pm on Saturday, March 14, the valves were tested and confirmed to work, and 10 patients were outfitted with the 3D-printed alternatives in their respirators.
The 3D printing of these respirator valves became one of the first examples of how additive manufacturing could provide versatile, on-demand solutions for a world thrust into a global pandemic that would come to claim 6.5 million deaths and counting.
Supply Chain Stopgap
Face masks may be ubiquitous today, but they were hard to come by in Spring 2020. While the COVID-19 pandemic put global healthcare systems under critical strain, it also exposed the vulnerabilities of conventional supply chain mechanisms, including the health care system’s overreliance on foreign-made medical equipment and an inadequately supplied Strategic National Stockpile. Plagued with a serious lack of resources, healthcare providers had to seek alternative sources of critically needed materials.
That’s where 3D printing soared. According to the FDA, between Feb. 15 and July 15, 2020, companies with 3D printing capability, hospitals, and even 3D printing enthusiasts printed about 38 million face shield parts, 12 million nasal swabs used in tests, 2.5 million ear savers for masks, 241,000 mask parts, and 116,000 ventilator parts.
Due to its digital versatility and quick prototyping, 3D printing lends itself well to rapid emergency response. Even during severe disruptions in supply chains, critical parts can be manufactured on-demand by any decentralized 3D-printing facility in the world by leveraging designs shared online.1
Scientists even assessed the practicality of 3D printing techniques in the treatment of COVID-19 patients, particularly those at an increased risk of severe illness or death due to prior cardiovascular disease. For example, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana−Champaign published a study evaluating the treatment of myocardial injury with a 3D-printed, stem cell-loaded, micro-channeled hydrogel patch. In experiments, the patch performed well, ensuring the full therapeutic potential of the cells and helping to reduce the degradation of myocardial tissue post-infection. Additionally, the microchannels sharply decreased the number of cells needed to recover cardiac function.2
3D Printing Post-COVID-19
Analyzing 3D printing efforts in the middle of the pandemic, a group of Turkish researchers identified key technological areas for the continual and future development of 3D printing. They say future research should focus on clinical applications of additive manufacturing, such as the development of automatic methods to combine CT scan results and design analyses with additive manufacturing technologies in order to manufacture patient-specific implants.3
Additional R&D may help to upscale bio-printed scaffolds and tissues for clinical applications and to improve the cost-effectiveness of additive manufacturing for tissue engineering—enabling in situ repair of organs and tissues.3
“The main attributes of 3D printing—a high level of customization for specific needs and decentralized manufacturing—are likely to bring about local microgrids of 3D-printing factories. Digitization will continue to transform 3D-printing machines into key parts of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 environments in the post-pandemic, cyber-physical age,” Choong et al. conclude in their August 2020 paper, “The global rise of 3D printing during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
3D Printing in Space
Humans are still far from long-term space stays, but that doesn’t mean NASA and others aren’t busy finding potential solutions to acknowledged problems.
For example, since it would not be feasible to bring raw materials to build houses and shelters on the moon or other planets, researchers need to figure out how to exploit what is already in space. In 2021, the Redwire Regolith Print study successfully demonstrated 3D printing on the International Space Station using a material simulating regolith, or loose rock and soil found on the surfaces of planetary bodies, such as the moon. The results are helping to advance practices for in-situ resource utilization for additive manufacturing of parts, tools and structures on the lunar surface.
Similarly, the MMPACT project completed a successful build and hot fire test of the world’s first 3D printed Lunar Landing Pad. The project completed prototype tests of both laser-melted and molten regolith extrusion construction methods and undertook characterization of cementations mixtures of lunar regolith simulants and binders. The methods have now been confirmed as viable candidates for lunar construction.
Looking forward, the 2023 NASA budget proposes monies for key achievements, including “exploration of a range of topics from stem cell biology to 3D printing.” Testing is also planned in evaluation of advanced 3D printing technologies for liquid rocket engines in landers and on-orbit stages/spacecraft.
The RAAMBO project, short for Refractory Alloy Additive Manufacturing Build Optimization, will advance additive manufacturing use of refractory alloys through an integrated computational materials engineering approach. Alloys of refractory metals, such as tungsten, perform well at extremely high temperatures above 2000°C, but their properties at low temperatures make component fabrication and usage challenging. RAAMBO is seeking to explore that idea further, putting into place process parameters needed to fabricate defect-free parts, as well as studying the effects of additive processing on material properties that are not fully known.
Three years ago, NASA awarded a $73.7 million contract to Made In Space (now Redwire Corporation) to demonstrate the capabilities of additive manufacturing to build and assemble complex components in space, deliver on-demand hardware, and allow for structures larger than current rockets can deliver and deploy to orbit. Since then, the partnership, referred to as On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing 2 (OSAM-2), has had multiple successes. This year, the project passed mission Critical Design Review, ending the design phase and beginning the process of building and verifying flight hardware.
OSAM-2 is expected to launch in 2023. The technology will build two beams and deploy a surrogate solar array utilizing robotic manipulation. Once deployed and positioned in orbit, the small spacecraft will 3D print the two beams. While the first beam is being printed, the solar array will be unfurled from the spacecraft. After the 33-foot beam is completed and locked into place by the robotic arm, the arm will reposition the printer, which will then print a 20-foot beam from the other side of the spacecraft.
NASA says a successful orbital flight will demonstrate the technology’s ability to reduce risk and achieve measurable cost savings over traditional cargo launches to space.
References
1. Choong, Y.Y.C., Tan, H.W., Patel, D.C. et al. The global rise of 3D printing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nat Rev Mater 5, 637–639 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-020-00234-3
2. Molly R. Melhem, Jooyeon Park, Luke Knapp, Larissa Reinkensmeyer, Caroline Cvetkovic, Jordan Flewellyn, Min Kyung Lee, Tor Wolf Jensen, Rashid Bashir, Hyunjoon Kong, and Lawrence B. Schook. ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering 2017 3 (9), 1980-1987. DOI: 10.1021/acsbiomaterials.6b00176
3. Aydin, A., Demirtas, Z., Ok, M. et al. 3D printing in the battle against COVID-19. emergent mater. 4, 363–386 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42247-021-00164-y