3D Printed Face Shield

Abstract

In the fourth industrial revolution, a sort of printing technology that has the potential to transform the manufacturing industry is 3D printing. It takes just a few hours to develop a new product with this technology which might take days and months with traditional technologies. This research highlights a low-cost 3D printer’s design and its working. The whole printer was developed to make it less expensive than similar products already on the market. The results show that low-cost printers with good accuracy can be designed.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

3D printing is a way of generating actual 3D products also recognized as additive manufacturing with the help of computer software without any human involvement. Often this technology is referred to as Rapid Prototyping as its function relatively quick producing a physical object from a CAD design model. This is an automatic manufacturing technique that can print an object of any shape with any material. This is achieved using additive processes in various forms, multiple slabs of components are placed down one top after one another. It is different from conventional engineering i.e. subtractive manufacturing in which an object is manufactured by removing unwanted material in form of chips but here additive manufacturing is used where an object is manufactured layer by layer without any wastage in any form. The object is printed from bottom to up in the form of layers in the exact shape and size as required.

This technology spawned a slew of other 3D production methods, like fused filament fabrication (FFF), SLS 3D printing, and so on. The best machine must provide many benefits in terms of cost, flexibility, parameters, processing time, etc.

We can print almost any shape and object without any problem. Also, printing is not limited to the material as they can print materials available in any form say solid, liquid, or powder. Recent developments in this field show that it is being used in fields like medicine to print biomaterials, automobile field to print automobile parts, aerospace industry, space industry, food industry, etc.

The most obvious benefit is that we save resources by eliminating the requirement to remove edges and increasing material use. It's also capable of finishing intricate patterns. It allows designers to construct pieces with a geometric and structural complexity that would be hard to manufacture using traditional methods.

Although this technology has numerous advantages it has one major problem: its cost. Cost is the biggest hurdle for this printer’s application in many small and medium scale industries and also it is greatly related to the accuracy and reliability of the machine. The cost of a printer starts increasing as we aim for higher accuracy and reliability.

II. RELATED WORKS

A. Technological Advancements in 3D Printing: Review [1]

The authors of this study have outlined the numerous 3D printing technologies that have been employed since the early 1980s, as well as the hardware and software that have been used.[1]

 B. 3D-Printing And Electronic Packaging [2]

This article examines the present state of 3D printing in terms of various processes and technologies, as well as their prospective applications in electronics production and packaging. The research also discusses design and modeling approaches, as well as how they might be utilized to better understand material behavior during 3D printing and reduce residual stress. [2]. The report then summarized the main obstacles that must be solved until 3D printing would become a widespread technology in the electronics sector.

C. Scheming 3D printing applications in the realm of architecture [3]

This study proposes two types of 3D printing equipment for use in the world of architecture design [3]. It may be achieved by doing a realistic design study in order to increase the speed and adaptability of printing technologies in the construction area.

D. Developing low-cost 3D printer [4]

In this paper, the authors describe the various 3D printing techniques that are generally used. They have devised a way to design a 3D printer at a lower cost by describing the various software and hardware components that can be used in the system.

III. METHODOLOGY

3D printing is a new way of making items directly with digital models utilizing a layer-by-layer component build-up procedure. We employs the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) process in this design, which allows us to create items out of production-grade thermoplastics. Objects are constructed by melting a thermoplastic filament and extruding it layer by layer through a nozzle. Digital designs are submitted to the 3D printer in FDM. A controller attached to the computer may move the nozzle both in horizontal and vertical directions. Layer by layer, the strands are heated and fed out onto the base. The material cools and solidifies as the nozzle advances across the base, producing a strong link with the prior layer. The nozzle head rises at this stage in order to deposit a further layer of plastic.

The first step of printing is creating the object design of the face shield and its headband. The design of the object can be made using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) for the machine to use as a guideline for printing. 3D printers read the design of the model and create the thing by laying down layers of material till the desired shape is achieved.

The stereo lithography file type, abbreviated as "STL," is created by mathematically separating the surfaces of 3D-built objects into several triangles. Surfaces are represented in STL format as a collection of triangles. Simple triangles form the surface, which fit together with a jigsaw puzzle. As a result, a step-by-step printing procedure is carried out. The .STL file format is used to load the designed file into the machine.

Now we have to slice the object file. The object file is sliced into G as well as M codes, which are utilized to operate the machine. A.STL file created with CAD software is imported into the CURA program. This program divides the object code into several horizontal levels for layer-by-layer printing. It provides flexibility in slicing layer thickness and printer settings. Each layer's particular data will be transmitted to the Arduino software in order for it to run.

An Arduino circuit board is used in this design, which would be an open-source, single-chip microcomputer, electronic prototyping platform. There are two elements to it: hardware and software. The user is given the software portion in order to compile the application. The hardware portion is responsible for running the appropriate application. Arduino is a low-cost output/input interface board with a Processing/Wiring programming environment that is similar to Java and C. Using stepper motors, we control the Arduino to move the pieces of a 3D printer such as the nozzle, bed, as well as extruder.

The final shape is formed by connecting or fusing all such layers, which directly relate to the model's remote cross-sections. At last, a little post-processing or finishing might be required depending upon the object being printed.

V. RESULT

3D printing is a new technology having lots of potentials. Proper analysis of its impact on society, environment, industries, etc. must be done. This technology creates custom fit objects in the least possible time with good accuracy. Recent developments in this field show that the accuracy of 3D printers is improving day by day. Further developments in this technology will remove all barriers to this technique and all parts/objects will eventually be manufactured entirely with 3D printers. 3D printers will completely eliminate the conventional manufacturing systems and have the potential to create the next industrial revolution. Here we are printing a face shield using a 3D printer which will be useful for frontline workers and people during these pandemic days in a cost-efficient way.

VI. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We would like to thank various people, as well as HKBK College of Engineering, for their help and support during our graduate education. Predominantly, we want to express our gratitude to Prof Aarthy Gunasekar for her enthusiasm, patience, interesting and thoughtful observations, practical assistance, and ideas, all of which have considerably assisted us during our studies. Because of her wide knowledge, deep competence, and professional abilities in Quality Control, we were able to successfully complete our research. This endeavor might not have been feasible without her assistance and instruction, and we couldn't have requested a finer study guide. We'd also like to express our gratitude to Visvesvaraya Technological University for admitting us to the degree program. In addition, we believe this is due to appreciation for the whole staff at our college.

References

[1] Pratik S Kamble, Dr. Suchitra A Khoje and Prof. Jyoti A Lele, “Recent Developments in 3D Printing Technologies : Review,” 2018, Second International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control Systems. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control Systems (ICICCS 2018) IEEE Xplore Compliant Part Number: CFP18K74-ART; ISBN:978-1-5386-2842-3 [2] C Bailey, S Stoyanov, T Tilford and G Tourloukis, “3d-Printing And Electronic Packaging,” [3] Yuang Zhang, Hongqian Lu, Hongwei Chen and Meiyu Sun, “Application design of 3D printing technology in the field of Architecture,” The 31th Chinese Control and Decision Conference (2019 CCDC) 978-1-7281-0106-4/19/$31.00 c 2019 IEEE [4] Lalit Kumar, Qamar Tanveer, Vineet Kumar, Mohd. Javaid, “Developing low cost 3D printer,” Journal of Applied Sciences and Engineering Research, Vol. 5, Issue 6, 2016. [5] Shyh-Kuang Uenga, Lu-Kang Chenb, Szu-Yao Jenc, “A preview system for 3D printing”, Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Applied System Innovation, 2017. [6] Barry Berman, “3-D printing: The new industrial revolution,” Business Horizons, ISSN: 0007-6813, Vol: 55, Issue: 2, 2012 [7] Yahya BOZKURT, Elif KARAYEL. \"3D printing technology; methods, biomedical applications, future opportunities and trends\", Journal of Materials Research and Technology, 2021 [8] N. R. Deepak and S. Balaji, \"Performance analysis of MIMO-based transmission techniques for image quality in 4G wireless network,\" 2015 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research (ICCIC), 2015, pp. 1-5, doi:10.1109/ICCIC.2015.7435774. [9] Deepak NR, Thanuja N, Smart City for Future: Design of Data Acquisition Method using Threshold Concept Technique, International Journal of Engineering and Advanced Technology (IJEAT) ISSN: 2249-8958 (Online), Volume-11 Issue-1, October 2021

Copyright

Copyright © 2022 Mohanraj R, Ramasubramanian B, Sutharsen TS, Ajay M, Prof. Aarthy Gunasekar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.