Face Shield for lasercutter (Covid-19 protection)

Design of a protection face shield (not a filtering/breath mask!) for Covid-19 pandemic, this design can be produced using a lasercutter (not by 3D printing, laser cutting is a much faster technology for production of many pieces, easily scalable to thousands of pieces and more).

This project has been developed at the ICTP Scientific FabLab, with help and assistance from all technical assistants of the fablab and some other friends and makers with technical expertise and experience in a hospital environment with professional use of similar protection devices.

It can be described as a “open facial protection shield”, designed for a quick and low-cost production with fablab technologies (lasercutter). It is used to protect the face of professional operators from jets of liquids and/or droplets possibly infected with the virus, it has to be combined with a breathing mask (not part of the project), since it isn’t providing any filtration of the breathed air.

The advantages of this design are:

• we are using material that we already have (PMMA/acrylic 5mm-thick sheets and PETG 0.5mm-thick thin A4 sheets)
• the fabrication process is very fast (we can make 30+ shields per hour).

We made a total of about 300 shields, now we are running out of material (that is quite difficult to purchase in Italy, at the moment).

Please note: our facial shields have not been not "authorised" or "certified" in any way by any official authority, but they have been tested and used in North-Eastern Italy during the pandemic by many professionals (security forces, police, health personnel, volunteers of civil guard - Protezione Civile, and others).

Details

We used a lasercutter with 100W of power and a cutting size of 130x90cm, but a smaller one will work as well, albeit at a slower speed / production capacity.

Here you will find all the files for the parts we designed, ready for use on a laser cutter, and a few information on the materials:

• the most important file is “protezione_V0.9” in three formats (pdf, svg and dxf). It is used to cut the horizontal part of the face shield, from a sheet of acrylic (PMMA) of 5mm of thickness (but 3-4 mm are probably also OK, albeit not tested). This part doesn’t even need to be transparent
• an optional file: “nastro4_8pezzi-linea unica” in format SVG, it is used to cut 8 pieces of “string” from a 9cm-wide rubber band, but you can just simply use a standard narrower rubber band for each mask, or cut them by hand (cutting rubber band with the lasercutter is ugly and difficult, and very smelly).

The other important piece of material is a sheet of PETG (one for each mask), size A4 (around 21x30cm), with a thickness of 0.5mm, that has to be inserted in the curved slot of the acrylic part, and so will protect the face.
You can also use a thin sheet of polycarbonate or transparent PVC or other polymers (but be very careful before trying to cut them at the lasercutter, for example PVC is a NO), they were commonly used as transparent “paper-like” support for projecting "slides" or "transparencies" in the past, and are still used as transparent “cover page” for brochures, or home-made books/publications...

Finally, we used some 20 cm of adhesive soft rubber band, attached on the edge of the mask that is touching the face, to make it more comfortable for long times.
An even better alternative is to use 20cm of soft plastic pipe (ID:5mm OD:8mm, type "crystal" for food-grade use), that has ben cut longitudinally (see photos).