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For new inventions in particular, you have to find suitable production capacity first, which has been an arduous process until now. Resourceful inventors have discovered the advantages of digital manufacturing marketplaces during the COVID crisis. The innovative on-demand approach enables them to bring their anti-pandemic products to market much faster than with previously available methods.
Xometry is the world’s largest on-demand manufacturing marketplace that automatically connects thousands of suppliers and customers. The company offers both prototyping and serial manufacturing via CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication, 3D printing, and injection moulding. Using data science, Xometry’s Instant Quoting Engine analyses CAD files and instantly calculates production price and possible lead times. After the order is placed, the platform takes care of the rest by searching for suitable manufacturers with free capacity.
Engineer Paul Byrne is a great example of how to take advantage of this. As early as January 2020, it was clear to the British engineer that the sheer scale of the Covid-19 pandemic would create a need for new devices for fighting the virus.
“I was looking for a different way to remove viruses from the air in enclosed spaces. Eventually, I came up with Viralink,” says the engineer, who has previously worked for NASA and in other intriguing roles. His invention extracts the air out of a room and passes it through a powerful radiation area that is shielded from the outside. There, the light kills disease-causing pathogens. The results are impressive: 99.99 percent of all coronaviruses are killed by the device, a Boston University lab test found.
Byrne quickly developed his effective filter system last year. However, he didn’t have the necessary contacts in manufacturing to be able to roll out the idea. At that point Paul Byrne found Xometry’s cutting edge platform. “It was important for me to find a reliable European supplier. On a single dedicated platform, I can now order all the parts that are required to make Viralink,” the design engineer says. He orders metal CNC parts online on the Xometry site and receives the packages with the finished parts in the mail in a few weeks. All Byrne has to do then is assemble them. “I did my job as an engineer, Xometry did its job as a supplier – now we can fight this awful pandemic together,” says Byrne.
Meanwhile, California-based X.Lab is also using Xometry to manufacture covid-fighting technology. The tech startup develops digital solutions in public safety and healthcare. Its new product, Feevr, makes it possible to spot individuals with elevated body temperatures in crowds. Identifying infected people is carried out without contact and with the help of a device that can measure body temperature from as far as several meters away.
The design team here used Xometry to implement the idea. X.Lab cites the high speed at which they can order parts this way as a huge positive. They use the platform to order various housings and frames that are produced using additive processes, some of which are also injection moulded. The variety of manufacturing processes and materials was an important reason for choosing the manufacturing marketplace route, says Jasun Tate, X.Lab's Chief Security Officer: “This was the only supplier that could meet all our requirements on a single dedicated platform,” says Tate. The 3D production methods that X.Lab use include HP Multi Jet Fusion and selective laser sintering (SLS).
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.