'1000 by 1000' is a distributed manufacturing strategy to rapidly scale up N95 equivalent mask production.
Current manufacturing methods for producing N95 filtering facepiece respirators [FFR] filter material require significant investments of both time and capital. They are inflexible and inherently centralized. Therefore scaling the production capacity and delivering the masks to where they are needed the most is a key challenge in overcoming global COVID-19 crisis.
Our goal is to develop tools that will provide a competitive alternative to existing centralized manufacturing approaches and make them available to as many people as possible anywhere in the world. Ultimately, we would like to provide the means to produce N95-grade filter material to parts of the world that have never had access to this material.
Essential medical supplies are critical for health care delivery - whether it is a metropolitan connected city or a remote part of the world. COVID-19 demonstrates that centralized supply chains will always have gaps and when severely perturbed, will not recover for a long time to come. The fact that health care workers globally do not have access to critical protective equipment needed - requires us to rethink medical supply manufacturing solutions from the ground up.
Here, we envision a new methodology for mask manufacturing. Instead of a centralized factory making 1 million masks a day - imaging thousands of small scale manufacturing facilities making tens of thousands of masks (10 million+). Here we share a technology platform that can do just that.
Inspired by Cotton Candy Machines
Fundamentally, cotton candy is a non-woven mesh of sugary fibers, the same kind of material characteristics as found in commercially produced N95 filter material. When subject to a centrifugal force, molten sugar is lengthened and stretched into fine fibers. The same principle can be applied to other polymers like polypropylene. Indeed, this idea was suggested as early as the 1920’s as the basis for a process called centrifugal melt spinning [CMS].
In contrast to large-scale industrial production using a technique known as melt blowing, CMS decoupled polymer melting and extrusion. This reduces the complexity of the process while leaving the material throughput viable. Thus CMS is an ideal process to realize distributed small and medium scale production of non-woven polymeric materials.
Discover Our Projects
Retrofit Cotton Candy Machine
We have validated that the principle of centrifugal melt spinning can be used to produce non-woven nano- and micrometer fiber meshes at sufficient throughput to be viable as the basis for a distributed manufacturing approach by repurposing a commercially available cotton candy machine. We further demonstrate that the produced non-woven materials perform at filtration efficiency equivalent to N95 grade filter material.
Factory in a Box to make filtration fabrics from recycled plastics
We are currently developing a self-contained device that can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the world for the manufacture of N95 grade filtration material utilizing only recycled plastics. This enables a cradle to cradle low-cost and local manufacturing based approach with waste products possibly being converted to filtration materials.
Distributed Quality Control
Ensuring the manufactured material is consistently of high quality is a major concern. We are developing a suit of frugal tools to ensure high quality production in a distributed fashion.