{"id":20993,"date":"2020-05-27T12:28:47","date_gmt":"2020-05-27T11:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/?p=20993"},"modified":"2020-07-14T09:37:38","modified_gmt":"2020-07-14T08:37:38","slug":"27-may-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/2020\/05\/27-may-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Swansea University has temporarily switched to producing 5000 litres of hand sanitiser a week"},"content":{"rendered":"

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With the help of their Swift-Cut plasma cutting machine Swansea university shifts from solar to hand sanitiser \u2013 producing 5000 litres a week for the NHS<\/h2>\n

A solar tech lab at Swansea University has temporarily switched to producing 5000 litres of hand sanitiser a week, to help the NHS fight the Coronavirus outbreak.\u202f The sanitiser, which meets the standard set by the World Health Organization, is already in use in the Welsh NHS.<\/p>\n

Their amazing\u202fteam is made up of\u202fover 30\u202fvolunteers from three different Swansea University Colleges and Schools whose mission is to support Wales\u2019 NHS heroes whilst they fight the global pandemic on the front line.<\/p>\n

Manufacturing is being led by SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre,\u202fwho specialise in solar research and\u202fin developing\u202fbuildings that generate, store and release their own solar energy.<\/p>\n

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The Idea<\/strong><\/p>\n

They have a very wide skillset amongst the team at SPECIFIC, mainly focused around engineering and chemistry. They are involved with the upscale of novel ideas for integration to industry (the stepping stone between academia and industrial scale production) , so when their facilities manager Mark Watkins was asked if they could share some ideas for making large batches of hand sanitiser, they jumped at the chance to get stuck in, and a few days later were mixing 1000 litres of sanitiser at a time.<\/p>\n

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The Swift-Cut machine<\/strong><\/p>\n

Their Swift-Cut cnc machine came into play when it became apparent that although they were producing large 5 litre bottles of sanitiser, it wasn\u2019t convenient for all end users (frontline workers) to carry a very large quantity of sanitiser around \u2013 the demand for smaller containers was increasing, but smaller bottles means more time spent and accuracy required when filling the bottles.<\/p>\n

Tom Griffiths, Technology Transfer Fellow (Smart Systems) decided to have a play with the Swift-Cut machine without actually doing any plasma cutting. His prior experience with retrofitting and fault finding CNC controllers came in to play and after a day spent wiring and levelling the machine they had an XYZ gantry CNC bottler!<\/p>\n

He knew that in the future the CNC would be used as a plasma cutter again, so with this in mind, he\u2019s made every modification completely reversible.<\/p>\n

By Friday, the 10th<\/sup>\u00a0of July, they will be at more than 10,000 \u00a0x 60ml bottles \u2013 the Swift Cut machine can fill 1,000 bottles in 16 minutes.<\/p>\n

The hand sanitiser bottles have gone initially to frontline workers and they\u2019re now getting interest from schools and small local businesses as they gear up with their plans to return to work safely.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re interested to know more technical details about how Specific managed to temporarily repurpose their Swift-Cut Pro plasma cutting table, please get in touch.<\/strong>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”20995″ img_size=”full”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/2″][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/2″][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] With the help of their Swift-Cut plasma cutting machine Swansea university shifts from solar to hand sanitiser \u2013 producing 5000 litres a week for the NHS A solar tech lab at Swansea University has temporarily switched to producing 5000 litres of hand sanitiser a week, to help the NHS fight the Coronavirus outbreak.\u202f The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":20995,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,43,84,55],"tags":[192,193,68,128,194,70],"class_list":["post-20993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-news","category-news-uk-2","category-swiftnews","tag-covid19","tag-hand-sanitiser","tag-metal-cutting","tag-plasma-cutting-machine","tag-repurposed","tag-swift-cut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swift-cut.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}