Cummins teams with national lab to produce millions of mask filters
Cummins is announcing a collaboration with the Carbon Fiber Technology Facility at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to produce filters for more than a million masks and respirators per day. Those masks will go to U.S. healthcare facilities.
Cummins has been exploring ways to use its air, fuel, and lube filtration products for heavy-duty engines to support healthcare providers during the pandemic. At the same time, Oak Ridge National Laboratory was searching for ways to scale up production of face masks with equipment used to produce precursor material for carbon fiber production at Cummins.
The two are collaborating on a technology called melt blowing to produce filter media for 9,000 N95 masks per hour.
Before two months ago, Cummins had never produced filter media for face masks. Today the company has shipped material for the production of millions of masks.