3D Printed Manufacturing of Respiratory Protection

CDJ Technologies is an additive manufacturing (AM) company with technology that enables rapid printing over large build areas. This resultant production throughput is differentiating within the AM technology space and enables the adoption of AM to fulfill small to medium volume production runs. There exist many items in which the ability to customize a single component of a system can add substantial value and efficacy – yet the ability to make these modifications via traditional mass-manufacturing technologies comes at a high production cost. CDJ has the capability to produce customized components via AM at substantially lower costs. One such example would be respiratory protection systems designed for high threat environments. The efficacy of these systems is predicated upon (i) the facepiece being comfortable enough that respirator is engaged when an exposure occurs, and (ii) that the facepiece of the respirator makes an adequate seal to the contours of the end user’s face. The size-binning of users into S/M/L facepieces is insufficient to ensure these two requirements, and thus customization of a single component could result in drastically different outcomes. This SBIR effort builds upon our Phase I and aims to produce semi-customized respirators as a demonstration of the technology.