TTU & UC 3-D Printers Helping With Mask Need

Tennessee Tech’s 3-D printers spent the weekend helping to add to the state’s supply of facemasks.

Under the eye of Michael Aikens, Director for the Tennessee Center for Rural Innovation, and Hunter Hinshaw, a Masters student in Mechanical Engineering, the printers worked all weekend creating headbands for the masks.

“If you think about a facemask that you would wear, maybe when you’re running a chainsaw or a weed eater band that kind of hold your plastic face mask,” Aikens said.

Governor Bill Lee and the Tennessee Higher Education Commission started the process Friday with a goal of printing 10,000 headbands. The state supplied a model via a computer file that had been cleared protocol. Aikens said multiple printers around campus got rolling Saturday night toward the Tech goal of 300 headbands by Tuesday.

Hinshaw called the 3-D printer like a “fancy hot glue gun.”

“It heats up and you put the glue stick in and you squeeze the trigger and it works the glue out in a liquid state,” Hinshaw said. “That’s exactly how these machines function. But instead of a glue state, you’re putting in a school with about a kilograms worth of plastic.”

“And so it works out the plastic in a malleable state. And as it lays it down, the plastic cools and then it’ll go and lay it over top of that. And over top of that. And so on and so on and so on until you have a 3-D component. So it starts from literally nothing and it lays down just like you would with a hot glue gun.”

But like your printer at home that runs out of ink, Aikens said these printers do have to be refilled. But if they run out of plastic, they pause and remember where they are.

Best of all in the current climate, one person can watch multiple printers and keep them resupplied.

3-D printers across the Upper Cumberland have been deployed to assist in the work including STEM educators in Clay, Jackson, Overton and Putnam counties. A blackhawk helicopter will arrive in Cookeville to pick up the headbands.