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Filtering Facepiece Respirator (FFR) is the most common respirator users in the health care environment utilize for personal protection from outside particles. Comfort and fit are important while wearing an FFR. This paper proposes a novel technology to produce customized face seal design for improving the wearing comfort and fit of FFR wearers. In order to customize the design of face seals, we scanned the faces of three subjects using three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning method. A customized face seal for a 3M 8210 N95 FFR for each headform was designed using reverse engineering technique. Next, the face seal prototypes were fabricated with Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) plastic using the 3D printing method. A force sensing system based on Arduino Uno R3 was developed, and the force sensor of this system was inserted between the FFR and headform to measure contact pressure. Experimental results showed that the newly designed FFR face seal provided the subjects with an improved contact pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reverse modeling of the headform when wearing a filtering facepiece respirator (FFR) and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation based on the modeling. The whole model containing the upper respiratory airway, headform, and FFR was directly recorded by computed tomography (CT) scanning, and a medical contrast medium was used to make the FFR “visible.” The FFR was normally worn by the subject during CT scanning so that the actual deformation of both the FFR and the face muscles during contact can be objectively conserved. The reverse modeling approach was introduced to rebuild the geometric model and convert it into a CFD solvable model. In this model, we conducted a transient numerical simulation of air flow containing carbon dioxide, thermal dynamics, and pressure and wall shear stress distribution in the respiratory system taking into consideration an individual wearing a FFR. The breathing cycle was described as a time-dependent profile of the air velocity through the respiratory airway. The result shows that wearing the N95 FFR results in CO2accumulation, an increase in temperature and pressure elevation inside the FFR cavity. The volume fraction of CO2reaches 1.2% after 7 breathing cycles and then is maintained at 3.04% on average. The wearers re-inhale excessive CO2in every breathing cycle from the FFR cavity. The air temperature in the FFR cavity increases rapidly at first and then stays close to the exhaled temperature. Compared to not wearing an FFR, wearers have to increase approximately 90 Pa more pressure to keep the same breathing flow rate of 30.54 L/min after wearing an FFR. The nasal vestibule bears more wall shear stress than any other area in the airway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an intelligent Filtering Facepiece Respirator (FFR) with a self-adjustable ventilation fan for improved comfort. The ventilation fan with an intelligent control aims to reduce temperature, relative humidity, and CO2concentrations inside the facepiece. Compared with a previous version of the FFR, the advantage of this new FFR is the intelligent control of the fan's rotation speed based on the change in temperature and relative humidity in the FFR dead space. The design of the control system utilizes an 8-bit, ultra-low power STC15W404AS microcontroller (HongJin technology, Shenzhen, China), and adopts a high-precision AM2320 device (AoSong electronic, Guangzhou, China) as temperature and relative humidity sensor so that control of temperature and relative humidity is realized in real time within the FFR dead space. The ventilation fan is intelligently driven and runs on a rechargeable lithium battery with a power-save mode that provides a correspondingly longer operational time. Meanwhile, the design is simplistic. Two experiments were performed to determine the best location to place the fan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a computational study on contact characteristics of contact pressure and resultant deformation between an N95 filtering facepiece respirator and a newly developed digital headform. The geometry of the headform model is obtained based on computed tomography scanning of a volunteer. The segmentation and reconstruction of the headform model is performed by Mimics v16.0 (Materialise, Leuven, Belgium), which is a medical image processing software. The respirator model is obtained by scanning the surface of a 3M 8210 N95 respirator using a 3D digitizer and then the model is transformed by Geomagic Studio v12.0 (3D system, Rock Hill, SC), a reverse engineering software. The headform model contains a soft tissue layer, a skull layer, and a separate nose. The respirator model contains two layers (an inner face sealing layer and an outer layer) and a nose clip. Both the headform and respirator are modeled as solid elements and are deformable. The commercial software, LS-DYNA (LSTC, Livermore, CA), is used to simulate the contact between the respirator and headform. Contact pressures and resultant deformation of the headform are investigated. Effects of respirator stiffness on contact characteristics are also studied. A Matlab (MathWorks, Natick, MA) program is developed to calculate local gaps between the headform and respirator in the stable wearing state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]