Suchergebnisse

Additive manufacturing is a worldwide trend and has been successfully adopted in a wide variety of domains. With applications ranging from automotive, aerospace, military, consumer goods bioprinting and even wearable electronics, the need for trained workforce in additive manufacturing is in high demand. Academia all around the world is adapting to this new trend trying to develop new strategies in delivering suitable competences to their undergraduate, masters' and PhD students. Such an initiative is the Erasmus+ project TecHUB 4.0 which brings together four complementary universities from Romania, United Kingdom and Poland. The main goal of the project is to bring together professors, industry specialists, researchers, managers, and entrepreneurs to deliver, using methods based on modern teaching technologies, especially on the use of web-based platforms and digital technologies – e-learning and interactive platforms, their knowledge to the young students wishing to become entrepreneurs in the additive manufacturing area. An Open Interactive Platform will be designed to be used equally by companies, by universities and by students, which will aggregate the demand and offer for internships developed in the scope of developing projects anchored in the day-to-day additive manufacturing business activity to solve concrete problems, but at the same time respecting all the economic constraints imposed on a business at beginning of its life.

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 ...