The 3D printing and mechanical testing team is currently in the research and development phase of the project, but they have big plans for all that they will get done once they have recycled filament to test.
The team’s goals for this year are to decide on some tests that will be used to quantify the properties of recycled filament, design test specimens to be used during these tests, and print these test specimens from both virgin filament and recycled filament.
In order to accomplish these goals, the team has begun researching useful methods to quantify the strength, toughness, and printability of the filament. Further, they have started designing or searching for pre-made designs of the test specimens used for each of those tests.
The next step in the team’s process is to print the test specimens using virgin filament and collect “control” sample data from those specimens. Finally, once the extrusion team is regularly producing recycled filament, the 3D printing and mechanical testing team will print test specimens using the recycled filament and collect test results to compare to the control results.
Although this plan depends heavily on the extrusion team’s success, we believe that both teams can work closely together to reach our collective goal of diverting a huge amount of 3D printed trash from the landfills.
This blog post was written by Brooke Chang.