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The novel approach can reduce the impact of a second wave of COVID-19 by sterilising a wide variety of surfaces.

Irish scientists have developed an innovative autonomous drone that delivers sterilizing UV light from above in order to disinfect public surfaces and reduce the transmission of COVID-19 and other viruses.

The novel method, which harnesses the versatility of drones, was developed by researchers at NUI Galway’s Health Innovation via Engineering (HIVE) lab. Their aim is to provide an added line of defense against a likely second surge of COVID-19 as lockdown regulations are eased worldwide.

The UVC Drone sterilising a hospital room

The researchers developed an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called the UVCDrone, which uses UV light to sterilize surfaces. The same team successfully developed a drone that can send life-saving insulin to remote locations last year.

Led by NUI Galway’s Professor Derek O’Keeffe and Dr. Ted Vaughan with Dr. Kevin Johnson from the University of Limerick, the team came up with a solution that could help to sanitize a wide variety of public places, including hospital wards, restaurants, trains, shopping centers, and airport terminals.

The UVCDrone utilizes UVC (100-280nm) which is a high frequency, short wavelength radiation. This can destroy the genetic material of microorganisms, preventing their capacity to reproduce — therefore sterilizing surfaces.

The light is harmful to humans, so the UVC Drone can easily be programmed to deliver the UVC light on surfaces at night time, or at specific times when spaces will be unoccupied.

The drone uses an AI algorithm to fly autonomously around a space while emitting its light over surrounding surfaces. Once finished, it lands back in its dock for recharging.

 

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Italian research centre, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN – National Institute for Nuclear Physics) used its FDM 3-D Printer to produce the entire mechanical structure of a first-of-its-kind cosmic UV telescope currently situated aboard the ISS, realised under the coordination of the Italian Space Agency.

 

3-D printed Mini-EUSO Flight Model

Designed to study terrestrial and cosmic UV emissions from the ISS, the telescope named ‘Mini-EUSO’ (Multiwavelength Imaging New Instrument for the Extreme Universe Space Observatory) was recently launched into space onboard a Soyuz rocket and successfully placed on an earth-facing window of the ISS’ Russian Zvezda module.

With an orbit of about 90 minutes, Mini-EUSO records all space and atmospheric objects and events within sight, including UV emissions from night-earth, transient luminous events, meteors, space debris and more. The final scientific objective is to produce a high-resolution map of the Earth in the UV range (300-400nm), which is expected to significantly advance research on cosmic rays, but also serve as an important experiment for future space missions. The impact of 3D printing on this project has been transformational.

Using FDM 3D printing throughout the production of the Mini-EUSO’s mechanical structure enabled to reduce the overall cost of the project by a factor of ten, as well as saved around a whole year of development time.

Producing the mechanical structure of Mini-EUSO presented several challenges. Most notably, the team needed a material that could meet the stringent certification requirements of the aerospace industry, as well as bear the mechanical stress and vibrations of a rocket launch.

 

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Custom 3D printed mask with replaceable filter, obtained from a 3D scan of the wearer, an open-source project released.

3D printing in last couple of years has become an exciting new way to create many different objects in very short time. That is because a 3D printer is designed to allow you print real, 3 dimensional objects from only a template. It eliminates the need to work with many different materials to create something new, exciting and beautiful.

WASP (World’s Advanced Saving Project) has developed a custom 3D printed face mask with a replaceable filter that’s non-irritating and acts like a sterilizable ‘second skin’. The wearer can be scanned using photogrammetry with a standard smartphone camera from a distance of 1 meter. All the photos taken are then reprocessed to create a 3D mesh.

The material used is PCL: Polycaprolactone as it can be placed in direct contact with the skin. PCL is a bio-material widely used in the medical field.  Its melting point is 100°C, it doesn’t warp and there’s no need for a heated chamber to print it האתר שלי.

All masks are printed using Delta WASP 4070 INDUSTRIAL 4.0.  This 3D printer allows you to easily use technical materials like the described above. The 3D printed mask can be sanitised and used many times. The filter is located in a central front slot, where it can be replaced.  It only takes about an hour and a half to customise a perfect fit face mask in TPE, thus reducing skin irritation and long-use related issues.

This is an important development as far as the 3D printing technology is concerned. Keeping in the view the on-going COVID-19 crisis being faced by the world, these 3D printed face masks can be of a great value.

 

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Medtronic is sharing design specifications for a basic ventilator model with any company that wants to help produce them for hospitals racing to treat coronavirus patients as the medical device maker discusses a manufacturing partnership with Elon Musk’s Tesla.

The Dublin-based company on Monday posted specs for its PB 560 ventilator “to enable participants across industries to evaluate options for rapid ventilator manufacturing to help doctors and patients dealing with COVID-19.” Software and other information for the compact model, on the market since 2010 and sold in 35 countries, will also be added for download soon, Medtronic said.

“Medtronic recognizes the acute need for ventilators as life-saving devices in the management of COVID-19 infections. We know this global crisis needs a global response,” Executive Vice President Bob White said in a statement. “By openly sharing the PB 560 design information, we hope to increase global production of ventilator solutions for the fight against COVID-19.”

The Buffalo plant, along with Tesla’s main electric car factory in Fremont, California, were idled this month amid stay-at-home orders for most businesses and workers to help curb the spread of COVID-19.

 

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Using a custom built droplet network printer, researchers at the University of Oxford have developed a 3D printer that can create materials with several of the properties of living tissues.

The new type of material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies.

These printed ‘droplet networks’ could be the building blocks of a new kind of technology for delivering drugs to places where they are needed and potentially one day replacing or interfacing with damaged human tissues. Because droplet networks are entirely synthetic, have no genome and do not replicate, they avoid some of the problems associated with other approaches to creating artificial tissues – such as those that use stem cells.

‘We aren’t trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues,’ said Professor Hagan Bayley of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, who led the research. ‘We’ve shown that it is possible to create networks of tens of thousands connected droplets. The droplets can be printed with protein pores to form pathways through the network that mimic nerves and are able to transmit electrical signals from one side of a network to the other.’

Each droplet is an aqueous compartment about 50 microns in diameter. Although this is around five times larger than living cells the researchers believe there is no reason why they could not be made smaller. The networks remain stable for weeks.

‘Conventional 3D printers aren’t up to the job of creating these droplet networks, so we custom built one in our Oxford lab to do it,’ said Professor Bayley. ‘At the moment we’ve created networks of up to 35,000 droplets but the size of network we can make is really only limited by time and money. For our experiments we used two different types of droplet, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t use 50 or more different kinds.’

The unique 3D printer was built by Gabriel Villar, a DPhil student in Professor Bayley’s group and the lead author of the paper.

The droplet networks can be designed to fold themselves into different shapes after printing – so, for example, a flat shape that resembles the petals of a flower is ‘programmed’ to fold itself into a hollow ball, which cannot be obtained by direct printing. The folding, which resembles muscle movement, is powered by osmolarity differences that generate water transfer between droplets.

Gabriel Villar of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry said: ‘We have created a scalable way of producing a new type of soft material. The printed structures could in principle employ much of the biological machinery that enables the sophisticated behaviour of living cells and tissues.’

 

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