Welcome back to Spring semester! At the beginning of this semester, the team took time to remember our goals and identify our biggest obstacles in the way of those goals.
Our overall team goal is to create a functioning recycling system on a small scale that will eventually be scaled up to create a closed-loop system for the entire campus.
For the granulation team, most of their job is running smoothly, but the biggest challenge is creating an efficient sorting system in which the PLA waste can be easily sorted by color and type of filament. This can be especially difficult when breakaway is used for supports in more advanced printers because breakaway has different material properties than PLA, so it does not recycle into printable filament.
For the extrusion team, their biggest challenge is timing. It is hard to perfect the timing of our extruder (it depends only on the temperature and the rate of melting of the granules). Because of this difficulty, our recycled filament often comes out with varying diameters, which makes it very difficult to print with.
For the 3D printing and mechanical testing team, the biggest obstacles are identifying the best tests to quantify our results and reaching out to lab spaces on campus to be trained on and use their machines.
Of course, one big obstacle that is stopping us from making huge progress this academic year is the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the pandemic, we are unable to conduct in-person research as we would in a normal semester, which means that, for now, we have to focus on online research and reading.
This blog post was written by Brooke Chang.
Commenti