Epidemic Essentials: U-Shaped Water Trap Filler

A special design called U-shaped water trap (or in a simple form, U-trap) is used to prevent virus, bacteria or foul smell entering a residence through sewage/waste pipes. For this design to work, the U-trap must be filled with water. Indeed in the SARS outbreak in 2003, Amoy Gardens, a high density housing estate in Hong Kong, had a huge local outbreak and major cause was that the virus from a patient's stool was spread through pipes with dry U-traps:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539564/

This small water filler was designed to be put at wall typed drain openings and you can then fill water easily into the U-trap. Because this object is meant to contain water, if you print this using FDM printers, make sure you paint it with water resistant materials or otherwise the water may creep into the cracks between layers and infill and trap bacteria and virus there.

We print that with the Photocentric Liquid Crystal Magna, a large size DLP 3D printer. The printed objects will be water tight and we don't need to worry about water leakage.

Also we can print up to 24 pieces in one go as the same time required as printing one. For this model, it took around 2.5 hours to print at 200 microns on a FDM machine and so printing 24 will need 60 hours. Here we only need less than 9 hours to print 24.

More information on LC Magna: https://beets3d.com/product/photocentric-liquid-crystal-magna/

YouTube: https://youtu.be/9cae3ECjnI4