Print 3D masks and valves, a global race against the coronavirus

The Bogotá engineer Andrés Calderón stopped printing toys for his son on the 3D printer he had at home and began to find out how he could build masks and respiratory valves instead to donate them to the Colombian health network, which fears saturation from the advance of the coronavirus.

Calderón was thus following from the other side of the Atlantic the trail of a wide network of Spanish volunteers who, for weeks and under the name of Coronavirus Makers, have been manufacturing --with 3D printers-- all kinds of medical material necessary to help in the fight against the coronavirus, from respirators to masks or protective glasses.

The project started in Madrid and was extended to the rest of the Spanish regions, where teams are organized to manage the design, creation and logistics of useful products for health personnel, which are then distributed to the country's main hospitals.

Doctors, teachers and students from technical universities, engineers and workers from technology companies in various sectors are among the 13,000 members of the Spanish network at national level. Companies that manufacture automotive components, for example, have also joined, finding a new occupation after the shutdown of the vehicle assembly plants.

Coordinated through an instant messaging system, the network has its own website, coronavirusmakers.org, where there are several forums where technical questions or ideas are exchanged.

“We are producing every day and, depending on donations, we are distributing to hospitals,” says one of the network's members, Abel, to Efe in Barcelona. This work is fed by donations of 3D printing filament, and for this the huge network asks for more coils of the 1.75 mm PLA model.

With the Spanish example in mind, Andres Calderon and some other Colombian colleagues promoted a group in messaging networks that now add up to more than 400 engineers under the name Makers Colombia. In the group they share prototypes, logistical information and videos of the first models of masks that they hope will be ready next week.

“We must take advantage of the weeks of advantage we have over Spain. The objective is to try to cover the lack of respirators and masks while the industry manages to respond to the emergency,” the engineer explains to Efe.

The Makers Colombia have the challenge of fighting against time and providing hospitals with medical equipment before the infection curve soars in the South American country, which is still in an initial state of infection with 491 confirmed cases and six deaths.

The group is also looking for ways to get around the difficult logistics of a confined country and where materials are hard to find. Colombia is part of a long list of Latin American countries that demand respirators and masks from exporters like the United States and Europe.

“We have less easy access to certain materials in Colombia so we have to adapt to what we have here,” Calderón says. That's why they use some that they already have in their factories or at home.

But what is the difference between a breathing valve or a 3D mask and a conventional one? “The designs don't pass the same controls as a conventional respirator. It doesn't pass certifications because there's no time. It's a desperate measure,” explains Calderon.

Jaime Bermúdez, of the Colombian company Print3D and part of this national network, adds to Efe that there may be problems with resistance and porosity, although the material his 30 printers will use, nylon, “is very resistant”.

That is why Makers Colombia and other groups like Amigosxlavida for now focus mainly on printing masks for health workers because prototype respirators would need to be tested in hard-to-find artificial lungs.

Bermúdez, who lives in the city of Bucaramanga, capital of the department of Santander (east), is printing prototypes of the Venturi valves that are essential for ventilators that treat the most serious cases of coronavirus. He hopes that next week some 500 a day will come out of his warehouse, which he will give away to hospitals in the region.

All the designs used by the volunteers are 'opensource', that is, someone shared them on the web and thanks to this transparency thousands and thousands of people can replicate them all over the world either in Spain or in Colombia without intellectual property problems.

The country's major universities are also finalizing their prototypes. With them, Makers Colombia has the challenge of helping to overcome the coronavirus crisis in a context of scarce public resources.

“The country is not ready. Eighty percent of the beds in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) are occupied and in Bogotá there are about 1,000 beds for adults in a city of eight million people,” warns to Efe Victor De Currea, a doctor and political analyst.

With this challenge in mind, the photographs and the engineers' contributions fill the Telegram group in an avid race to protect Colombians from an eventual catastrophe. One of them shows their latest experiment: “Masks made of plastic taken from some Coca-Cola bottles”.