UC Davis engineers innovating protective equipment for medical workers during Covid-19 crisis
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Davis (KOVR) — The escalating virus crisis is being met head-on by a team of UC Davis engineers in a creative way.
They’re using the best of the best 3D printing equipment to help during the COVID-19 health crisis.
The students may be gone from the UC Davis campus, but bright minds connected with the university are still hard at work trying to shine a light on these dark times.
Steven Lucero is the manager of the Translating Engineering Advances To Medicine (TEAM) Lab. The team is helping come up with ways to make and improvise personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical workers.
The hope is the personal protective equipment Lucero and colleagues are working on will be made with the best 3D printing technology available.
“So we’re in a more unique position to really add value to do things like these 3D printed mask alternatives,” Lucero said.
The TEAM lab isn’t just working on masks, they’re also developing replacement parts for ventilators.
“So we’re talking about buying things that were not intended to be used in a medical setting and retrofitting them,” Lucero said.
The UC Davis engineers also working on making masks that don’t have to be thrown away after just one use.
“So we’re helping to identify ways that the existing PPE that’s designed to be disposable might be sterilized in a robust way and potentially re-used,” Lucero said.
As innovative as this all sounds, Lucero and his team hope their work won’t ever be needed.
“These types of solutions we are treating as a worst-case scenario and our hope is that they don’t become necessary,” he said.
Approximately 2,000 3D-printed replacement parts for respirators will soon be on the way to the UC Davis Medical Center.
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