Design and development of 3D printer filament extruder

• Main Author: Ng, Lim Huat
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English; English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: T Technology (General); TS Manufactures
• Online Access: http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/26036/; https://plh.utem.edu.my/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=121204

3D Printing technology is being widely used in the manufacturing industry and academic purpose research. This results in a significant increase in polymer consumption as the usage of 3D printer filament increases. The idea of using a filament extruder enables the reuse of the 3D printed objects made of ABS and PLA and turns them back into 3D printer filament. It is expected that consuming the recycled filament as filament material can greatly reduce the raw material cost. There are some critical issues must be determined such as identifying the optimal process parameters, consistency of the diameter of the filament and manufacturability of the recycled filament to reproduce the various shape of 3D products. Thus, the research objectives are to design and develop a filament extruder that can produce 3D printer filament, to analyze the variation of process parameters during the extrusion process and to present the manufacturability of 3D printing products on the recycled filament. Concept generation using a morphological chart and weighted matrix decision will be utilised to build a 3D printer filament extruder. The process parameters for the extrusion process will be determined using the Taguchi method to get the finest output of the recycled filament. After the extrusion process, the recycled filament is measured and recorded a thickness of 1.70mm±0.1mm where the thickness varying between 1.6mm to 1.8mm. the percentage of error of 8.57% and 7.43% for ABS and PLA filaments are considered small enough to ignore and will be sent for further process. For 3D printed quality inspection, the comparison has been made on the surface quality between the specimens made of recycled filament and the raw polymer commercial filaments. Out of five specimens printed with ABS and PLA, there are four recycled ABS specimens and three recycled PLA specimens showed the visual defects such as micro holes, cracks and missing layer or uneven surface on certain part of the specimen. However, all the recycled specimens showed an accurate dimension as the virgin specimens with an error of ±0.01mm only. Overall, the filament extruder fabricated is proved about the capability to recycle and reuse the wasted polymer to turn again the filament for reprocessing of 3D printing. This provides the ability to reduce the use of raw polymer and the pollution from the polymer waste.