G IVIN G B ACK By Tony Centonze
GIS Director Mike Wilson
undercover heroes @ apsu
APSU's GIS (Geographic Information Systems) office has been quietly going about its business for more than two decades, always providing great services to our community, but never receiving much fanfare. Then came the pandemic. “We are part of APSU, but our center is a stand-alone unit,” GIS Director Mike Wilson said. “We do a lot of work in the community for various city and county governmental departments. We work with firstresponders, and manage the Montgomery County 911 Center's data. We've also worked on various disaster relief efforts with the city and county. After the last tornado, we put together an app to speed damage assessment. Doug Catellier is our project manager. He spends a lot of time flying drones and making maps.” The GIS office normally operates with six full-time staff, and approximately ten to twelve students. Currently, the office has an additional ten to fifteen people working on a very special Covid-19 related project, making 3D printed face shields for medical personnel, and others working on the frontlines of this world-wide crisis. “This is our priority now, but we're still maintaining our GIS work with local agencies,” Wilson said. “We are very well known to city and county agencies, but the general public doesn't really know what we do. We've found ourselves in the media spotlight a lot more in recent years.” In 2008, Catellier did extensive work related to Kentucky's Wolf Creek Dam.
“Wanting to understand the effects of a possible dam burst in Kentucky, we helped local officials build models to predict how the flooding might occur,” Catellier said. “Fast-forward to the actual flood of 2010, our models were pretty accurate. We ended up working extensively with EMA (Emergency Management Agency), doing damage assessments. We personally helped capture a lot of data.” Wilson's GIS office actually acquired its first 3D printers just two or three years ago. “The university gives us latitude on what we can purchase, as long as the center is paying for itself,” Wilson said. “We got 3D printers at the same time a grant came through for a drone. These printers can get pricey. Our first one was about $1,500. At first, we were just making attachments for our drones. One of our students had a $200 printer that was as capable and flexible as ours. So, we ended up adding a second printer to our arsenal. They didn't realize at the time how valuable these printers would become. “This current project kicked off around March 19,” Wilson said. “APSU's General Scott Brower was appointed to the Governor's Coronavirus Task Force. He called and said, 'can you meet me in ten minutes? The state wants to know if we can print any medical equipment.' I said, funny you should ask, we just started researching that earlier this week. “I told Mike Hunter, start looking around before General Brower gets here. Let's see what's out there, and who is already having some success. In General Brower's
meeting they had highlighted the need for masks, face shields, etc. Face shields were among the items Hunter had already identified as something of interest. He investigated, and found a model that was popular overseas. General Brower said, 'let's see what we can do'. That was late morning. Within three hours we pulled our first one off the printer.” For this process, a roll of plastic wire is fed through, heated and melted. 3D printers utilize an additive manufacturing process to build the product, so there is virually no waste. “There are three main components, the frame, an acetate sheet, and an elastic band,” Wilson said. “It still takes about three hours to make one on this particular printer. Some of the other printers are slightly faster. The frame
"They didn't realize at the time how valuable these printers would become." and elastic are the easy parts. The hard part is the sheet of acetate. It's a 12” x 12” sheet that has to be cut. A complete set up is one frame, one elastic band, and 10 sheets of acetate.” Wilson says, this way, the end user can determine how often they want to replace the shield. The frame is reusable, and can be easily cleaned. The acetate is meant to be thrown away. The sheets are cut with a rounded bottom, and four holes that allow easy attachment to the frame. Continued on page 10
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Clarksville Living
