Project 1000x1000: biohackers home-brewing manufacturing equipment for raw N95 mask material

Ok, here is the ArXiv paper on Project 1000x1000, a Stanford BioEngineering project I worked on for making homebrewed polymer fibers for N95 masks. The project proposed a distributed manufacturing process (rotary jet spinning) as a scalable method to enable manufacturing of N95 grade filter material (a nano-fiber porous mesh). Current manufacturing of N95 grade filter material is centralized and relies on a melt-blown process which can not scale beyond one or two million masks/day per factory. The proposed method provided an alternative approach of a medium scale manufacturing (filter material for 10,000 masks per day) and if replicated by 1000 small businesses and groups across the country, would produce enough material for one to ten million masks per day.

This is a photo is of me and my friend Nikita, who first-authored the paper, holding the cotton candy-like fibers produced by this method. This was during peak-COVID, when we didn’t get much sleep from working on community efforts, so we’re wearing sunglasses to hide the bags under our eyes (and look cool).