After a few months of research with our full team, the 3D Printing and Mechanical Testing team has come up with a plan of action for when we can get back to in-person research.
For our first plan of action, we will focus on getting better measurements of our data for tensile tests. Currently, the test specimens that we have used have all failed along the filament adhesion lines. However, we want to test the actual properties of our recycled filament and not just the quality of the print layer adhesion.
In order to test the desired characteristics, we will begin by varying the print temperatures as well as the printer extrusion rate. This way, we can find the optimum settings for layer adhesion, and we will hopefully be able to test the filament properties with our tensile tests.
Our next plan of action is to expand our mechanical testing routines. In order to do this, we will start working on performing drop tests on our printed filament. We will also implement the use of a stiffness test and an impact resistance test to gather more quantitative data about our filament.
Hopefully, with this increase in quantitative testing data, we will be able to analyze our recycled filament and make edits to our recycling process in order to arrive at the highest-quality recycled filament.
This blog post was written by Brooke Chang.
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