Skip to main content
Sister Publication Links
  • Sustainable Plastics
  • Rubber News
Subscribe
  • Sign Up Free
  • Login
  • Subscribe
  • News
    • Processor News
    • Suppliers
    • More News
    • Digital Edition
    • End Markets
    • Special Reports
    • Newsletters
    • Resin pricing news
    • Videos
    • Injection Molding
    • Blow Molding
    • Film & Sheet
    • Pipe/Profile/Tubing
    • Rotomolding
    • Thermoforming
    • Recycling
    • Machinery
    • Materials
    • Molds/Tooling
    • Product news
    • Design
    • K Show
    • Mergers & Acquisitions
    • Sustainability
    • Public Policy
    • Material Insights Videos
    • Numbers that Matter
    • Automotive
    • Packaging
    • Medical
    • Consumer Products
    • Construction
    • Processor of the Year
    • Best Places to Work
    • Women Breaking the Mold
    • Rising Stars
    • Diversity
    • Most Interesting Social Media Accounts in Plastics
  • Opinion
    • The Plastics Blog
    • Kickstart
    • One Good Resin
    • Pellets and Politics
    • All Things Data
    • Viewpoint
    • From Pillar to Post
    • Perspective
    • Mailbag
    • Fake Plastic Trees
  • Shop Floor
    • Blending
    • Compounding
    • Drying
    • Injection Molding
    • Purging
    • Robotics
    • Size Reduction
    • Structural Foam
    • Tooling
    • Training
  • Events
    • K Show Livestream
    • Plastics News Events
    • Industry Events
    • Injection Molding & Design Expo
    • Livestreams/Webinars
    • Editorial Livestreams
    • Ask the Expert
    • Plastics News Events Library
    • Processor of the Year submissions
    • Plastics News Executive Forum
    • Injection Molding & Design Expo
    • Plastics News Caps & Closures
    • Women Breaking the Mold Networking Forum
    • Plastics in Automotive
    • PN Live: Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Polymer Points Live
    • Numbers that Matter Live
    • Plastics in Politics Live
    • Sustainable Plastics Live
    • Plastics Caps & Closures Library
    • Plastics in Healthcare Library
    • Women Breaking the Mold Networking Forum Library
  • Rankings & Data
    • Injection Molders
    • Blow Molders
    • Film Sheet
    • Thermoformers
    • Pipe Profile Tubing
    • Rotomolders
    • Mold/Toolmakers
    • LSR Processors
    • Recyclers
    • Compounders - List
    • Association - List
    • Plastic Lumber - List
    • All
  • Directory
  • Resin Prices
    • Commodity TPs
    • High Temp TPs
    • ETPs
    • Thermosets
    • Recycled Plastics
    • Historic Commodity Thermoplastics
    • Historic High Temp Thermoplastics
    • Historic Engineering Thermoplastics
    • Historic Thermosets
    • Historic Recycled Plastics
  • Custom
    • Sponsored Content
    • LS Mtron Sponsored Content
    • Conair Sponsored Content
    • KraussMaffei Sponsored Content
    • ENGEL Sponsored Content
    • White Papers
    • Classifieds
    • Place an Ad
    • Sign up for Early Classified
MENU
Breadcrumb
  1. Home
  2. News
October 26, 2020 09:43 AM

After making 500,000 face shields, Eaton eyes tech upgrade for ‘intelligent PPE'

Steve Toloken
Assistant Managing Editor
Plastics News Staff
  • Tweet
  • Share
  • Share
  • Email
  • More
    Reprints Print
    Eaton Corp.
    Eaton Corp. wants to build on its work producing over half a million face shields during the coronavirus pandemic, and start manufacturing 'intelligent' PPE with sensors and other technology.

    A challenging but ultimately successful scramble to make a half-million plastic face shields early in the pandemic now has one manufacturer trying to give a high-tech, Industry 4.0 makeover to that low-tech personal protective equipment.

    "Internally, we're calling it intelligent PPE," said Michael Regelski, senior vice president and chief technology officer for the electrical sector at power management firm Eaton Corp.

    The Northeast Ohio company, which has 93,000 employees worldwide, wants to digitize PPE.

    Back in the spring, Eaton led a project with other manufacturers that quickly shifted production lines at plastic molding and mold making companies around the state and churned out hundreds of thousands of face shields for the Ohio government.

    The need was clear: Eaton has made more than 500,000 face shields, about 50 percent above initial projections of 360,000.

    And that demand prompted some thinking. Could the firm take the Industry 4.0, interlinked technology in its electronics equipment and upgrade the decidedly simpler face shield?

    "We tried to ask, what can we do to digitally enable it to increase the safety and welfare of both the individual as well as the company and the other coworkers," Regelski said. "What we did is we looked at how to embed different sensing technology and communication technologies into the face shield and into any type of PPE."

    In an Oct. 14 interview, he said Eaton is close to launching the results of the effort. It sees applications for PPE that can do things like monitor vitals and pay attention to social distancing in a wide range of industries, from medical facilities to factories and other workplaces.

    "When you start looking at large-scale facilities, meat-packing facilities and everything, there's so much manual process and check and expense that's going in to keeping workers safe, that the industry is just ripe for something that could be automated," he said.

    The company is developing sensors that can easily attach to face shields or other protective gear or function on their own.

    Besides checking vitals, they can also monitor if a wearer is too close to another coworker for too long to regulate social distancing and create a digital trail of contacts within the factory. If someone tests positive, companies can use that to trace back who they may have interacted with.

    "If somebody is detected as having COVID, how do you quickly do a contact trace inside the facility and say who else might this person have run into and how do I notify them so that I don't have an outbreak inside of my site?" he said. "We're finding this to be a very well-received extension of the physical PPE that people have to wear anyway."

    Regelski said Eaton was exploring digitally enhanced PPE before the pandemic in areas more related to its core businesses, like protecting electrical workers, but COVID-19 dramatically accelerated that work.

    "This really gave it a turbocharge," he said. "It allowed us to look at this as a way not only to help get everyone back to work safely and keep them at work safely, but it also accelerates our strategic plans."

    Eaton is far from the only company looking at blending PPE and technology. A June report from the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work noted a lot of interest in "smart PPE" but cautioned it's a new area lacking in the standards and testing protocols available for regular PPE.

    An August report from consulting firm Technavio estimated an 11 percent annual growth rate for smart PPE from 2020 to 2024.

     

    Part of larger effort

    Eaton's work with face shields was part of a larger effort that started April 1 by Gov. Mike DeWine, the Ohio Manufacturing Alliance to Fight COVID-19, to help build up the state government's stockpiles of PPE.

    In all, more than 30 manufacturers in several groups working independently of one another delivered more than 1 million face shields, said Ethan Karp, CEO of the Cleveland-based Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network and one of the coordinators.

    "The state ended up distributing them wide and far," Karp said. "I know they're going to everyone from the poll workers who are going to be out there in [less than] two weeks to hospitals that needed them to nursing homes."

    "We regularly see these on news reports," he said. "I couldn't tell you exactly where and how they were distributed, but we delivered all within the time period they wanted, within those five weeks."

    Not that it was easy. Companies worked nights and weekends to compress mold building and product development that can take weeks down into a harried 10 days. The manufacturing that followed had its own challenges.

    "I would say it was very tough, things went wrong. Some manufacturers didn't perform, and then some overperformed and picked up the slack," Karp said.

    Having that redundancy in the systems turned out to be crucial, he said.

    "We had so much going on that couldn't go off without a hitch," he said. "Redundancy is required when going superfast. That was a learning. It was super well learned."

    For example, the group ran into trouble early on, sourcing a large order of polycarbonate needed for the shields.

    "When one of our plastic suppliers said, 'We've got all the plastics you need,' and then they said, 'Nope, we have this inferior plastic, actually,' we then had to scramble to get the hardest-to-find ingredients very quickly," Karp said. "We had three or four different companies search everywhere, lean on their friends and get us the material that was needed for this lifesaving process.

    "The people you trust, in times of crisis, are critical," he said. "We were creating this all new, so we didn't know who to trust. Now we know who to trust."

    Karp sees larger lessons for the companies that worked on the program.

    Manufacturers face a lot of challenges, he said, from building a strong workforce to modernizing their factories to handle the interconnected, Industry 4.0 technology linking their machines and that Eaton's using in its upgraded PPE. The way that supply chains responded in the face shield program shows resilience, he said.

    "This shows in many ways the strength of our industry and its innovation and ingenuity and its spirit," he said. "This is perhaps very fuzzy, but I think it's so important when we look at the other things that manufacturers are going to need to do in the future around adopting technologies and advancing their business model — all of the things that are coming along with Industry 4.0."

    RECOMMENDED FOR YOU
    Numbers That Matter Live — sign up for the next live
    Letter
    to the
    Editor

    Do you have an opinion about this story? Do you have some thoughts you'd like to share with our readers? Plastics News would love to hear from you. Email your letter to Editor at [email protected]

    Most Popular
    1
    ExxonMobil weighing options for more chemical recycling capacity
    2
    Wilbert Plastic Services adjusts to changes with new owner, leadership
    3
    PepsiCo on a ‘multiyear journey' toward bioplastics
    4
    After years of challenges, can secondary sortation take off?
    5
    Biden sets US goal to replace 90% of plastics with biomaterials
    SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE NEWSLETTERS
    EMAIL ADDRESS

    Please enter a valid email address.

    Please enter your email address.

    Please verify captcha.

    Please select at least one newsletter to subscribe.

    Get our newsletters

    Staying current is easy with Plastics News delivered straight to your inbox, free of charge.

    Subscribe today

    Subscribe to Plastics News

    Subscribe now
    Connect with Us
    • LinkedIn
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Instagram

    Plastics News covers the business of the global plastics industry. We report news, gather data and deliver timely information that provides our readers with a competitive advantage.

    Contact Us

    1155 Gratiot Avenue
    Detroit MI 48207-2997

    Customer Service:
    877-320-1723

    Resources
    • About
    • Staff
    • Editorial Calendar
    • Media Kit
    • Data Store
    • Digital Edition
    • Custom Content
    • People
    • Contact
    • Careers
    • Sitemap
    Related Crain Publications
    • Sustainable Plastics
    • Rubber News
    • Tire Business
    • Urethanes Technology
    Legal
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • Privacy Request
    Copyright © 1996-2023. Crain Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
    • News
      • Processor News
        • Injection Molding
        • Blow Molding
        • Film & Sheet
        • Pipe/Profile/Tubing
        • Rotomolding
        • Thermoforming
        • Recycling
      • Suppliers
        • Machinery
        • Materials
        • Molds/Tooling
        • Product news
        • Design
      • More News
        • K Show
        • Mergers & Acquisitions
        • Sustainability
        • Public Policy
        • Material Insights Videos
        • Numbers that Matter
      • Digital Edition
      • End Markets
        • Automotive
        • Packaging
        • Medical
        • Consumer Products
        • Construction
      • Special Reports
        • Processor of the Year
        • Best Places to Work
        • Women Breaking the Mold
        • Rising Stars
        • Diversity
        • Most Interesting Social Media Accounts in Plastics
      • Newsletters
      • Resin pricing news
      • Videos
    • Opinion
      • The Plastics Blog
      • Kickstart
      • One Good Resin
      • Pellets and Politics
      • All Things Data
      • Viewpoint
      • From Pillar to Post
      • Perspective
      • Mailbag
      • Fake Plastic Trees
    • Shop Floor
      • Blending
      • Compounding
      • Drying
      • Injection Molding
      • Purging
      • Robotics
      • Size Reduction
      • Structural Foam
      • Tooling
      • Training
    • Events
      • K Show Livestream
      • Plastics News Events
        • Plastics News Executive Forum
        • Injection Molding & Design Expo
        • Plastics News Caps & Closures
        • Women Breaking the Mold Networking Forum
        • Plastics in Automotive
      • Industry Events
      • Injection Molding & Design Expo
      • Livestreams/Webinars
        • PN Live: Mergers and Acquisitions
      • Editorial Livestreams
        • Polymer Points Live
        • Numbers that Matter Live
        • Plastics in Politics Live
        • Sustainable Plastics Live
      • Ask the Expert
      • Plastics News Events Library
        • Plastics Caps & Closures Library
        • Plastics in Healthcare Library
        • Women Breaking the Mold Networking Forum Library
      • Processor of the Year submissions
    • Rankings & Data
      • Injection Molders
      • Blow Molders
      • Film Sheet
      • Thermoformers
      • Pipe Profile Tubing
      • Rotomolders
      • Mold/Toolmakers
      • LSR Processors
      • Recyclers
      • Compounders - List
      • Association - List
      • Plastic Lumber - List
      • All
    • Directory
    • Resin Prices
      • Commodity TPs
        • Historic Commodity Thermoplastics
      • High Temp TPs
        • Historic High Temp Thermoplastics
      • ETPs
        • Historic Engineering Thermoplastics
      • Thermosets
        • Historic Thermosets
      • Recycled Plastics
        • Historic Recycled Plastics
    • Custom
      • Sponsored Content
      • LS Mtron Sponsored Content
      • Conair Sponsored Content
      • KraussMaffei Sponsored Content
      • ENGEL Sponsored Content
      • White Papers
      • Classifieds
        • Place an Ad
        • Sign up for Early Classified