This year, we’ve made some exciting progress with our 3D printing.
When this project first began, it took a while to produce PLA filament that was of high enough quality to 3D print. Because of this, the 3D printing portion of the project is relatively new.
Throughout the 2018-2019 school year, Lauren worked hard to produce a filament (through granulation and extrusion) that she was able to 3D print. Luckily, the printing with that filament went smoothly, which motivated Lauren and served as evidence that the goals of scaling this project to serve the entire campus were achievable (with a lot of work).
In August 2019, I took over the 3D printing portion of the project. I began by researching the best 3D printing models for testing mechanical properties. I had only done tensile tests on metal pieces before, so applying that knowledge to PLA took some supplemental research. I found a model for a “dog bone” tensile test specimen on Thingiverse, a free website where modelers post their files for people to print. Next, I printed three test specimen in both our recycled PLA and virgin PLA in order to compare results after mechanical testing. However, the printer that we borrowed for these specimen had a small print bed, so the “dog bones” were very small, which did not give clear tensile test results.
In January 2020, the team was able to purchase our own 3D printer! Since then, I have produced test prints to ensure that the printer was functioning properly, printed larger, full-sized test specimens in virgin PLA, and attempted to print full-sized specimens in recycled PLA. When I tried to print with the recycled filament, it clogged our extruder head, likely because of the varying filament diameter (a problem that we are trying to fix in our extrusion process).
Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, our campus has been closed until further notice, so we cannot access our printer. Therefore, our printing progress has been put on pause.
In the future, I plan to print more recycled PLA test specimens and perform mechanical tests to see the varying properties of different ratios of virgin to recycled material. I also plan to include additional mechanical tests (like the bending test and drop test) in order to gather more information on the properties of our recycled filament.
This blog post was written by Brooke Chang.
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