Across the country, as people fired up their 3D printers to make face masks in response to the shortage of N95 masks worn by health care workers treating COVID-19 patients, the Coast Guard Academy’s engineering department settled on a different mission: vet some of these designs to find the best one.
Building off the design by New London native Dr. Chris Wiles, the engineering department has tested different kinds of plastics – the plastics found in Legos and water bottles, for example – and tinkered with other design aspects.
The goal is to determine whether one of these 3D printed masks can be compared to the N95, so named because it filters out 95% of the tiny particles the wearer breathes in and out.
