Imflux builds injection molds for personal protective equipment

Imflux, Hamilton, Ohio, used its ability to create custom injection molds to help with the high demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) in the United States related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Procter & Gamble subsidiary says it is the only injection molding company that integrates processing software and machine learning and it's now using that technology to make PPE to help around the country.  

“We jumped into that conversation with a view on how could we use our skills and our talents and our assets to help in the things that work more broadly and could potentially be made available to the health care workers,” Imflux CEO Mary Wagner told the Journal-News, Butler County, Ohio.

For Imflux, the help came in two ways: using the injection molding to create headbands that attach to face shields and building molds that can help other companies to create test swabs.

The four-cavity mold for the face shields came together in 11 days, from drawing to delivery, while the 50-cavity nasal swab mold came together in nine.

Imflux also worked with a small team at P&G to create a prototype mold of nares (near nasal) swab variants. These could lead to better testing as they don’t require health care workers to wear full PPE to use them.

The effort to create these items started at the end of April, and they were first donated to the Cleveland Clinic and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Now, the company is working with the Federal Emergency Management  Agency to distribute the products more widely.

“We have an important piece in the flexibility we have in both making molds quickly and in producing the actual headbands to then provide the larger quantities,” Wagner says.

Imflux has remained open since the start of the pandemic as it was deemed essential business. This allowed the company to build these needed items quickly.

“We looked at the assets and the skills and capabilities we had and said, ‘We can help do this very quickly,’” Wagner says. “Part of it was just our passion to try and help provide support in the communities in which we’re working and living.”