Material Extrusion is All About Scalability
Alexander Geht MS
Founder & CEO at Testa-Seat | Empowering 3D Printing for Adaptive Seating Solutions | Innovation and Community at 412 Ability Tech | TOM: Pittsburgh Coordinator | Passionate about Assistive Technology and People
Material Extrusion has two main advantage that makes it scalable: The extrusion system and the machinery are very straightforward, and easily can be scaled up by scaling up the motion axis (Figure?2)(Holshouser et al., 2013). Moreover, the extrusion system can be applied to the mobile platform (Figure?3)(Keating et al., 2017), almost removing the printing scale bounders, and providing limitless printing bed size.?
Scaling up the boundaries of the mechanical axis enable the printing of more significant artifacts, using the same FDM extrusion system (Figure?1). Unfortunately, contras to desktop systems, printing small objects, and manufacturing significant artifacts require more structural strength and thicken the walls, which leads to a long forming process. Using this approach can take days to print increasing production cost and failure feasibility during the long printing process. Furthermore, large-scale printing objects also require a large amount of material, using traditional filament that costs ten times more than the raw pelletized material, turns printed objects into very costly.?
In the second step extrusion system was scale-up, increasing the material amount that can be extruded in this way, accelerating the manufacturing speed. Moreover, those systems use a screw-based extruder that uses industrial-grade materials compared to the traditional filament. Therefore, large-scale ME as Fused Granular Fabrication (FGF) technologies use injection molding extrusion systems, providing grater extrusion ratio, increasing forming speed while using industrial, cost-effective granular material.
figure?2: Left: FLEXIMATTER medium-scale AM[4]. Middle: THERMWOOD Large Scale AM[5], Right: WASP 3D Printing construction scale[6]
Furthermore, extrusion is the most common in the mass manufacturing process, having a diversity of materials like clay, concrete, food, calcium, and even biological tissue. Extrusion-based technology uses many inexpensive materials and uses only the necessary material to build the object. Due to the simple machinery and low material costs Extrusion based 3D Printers have always been the pioneering technology to be scaled up.?
Figure?3: Left: IAAC-Mini builders[7], Middle: MX3D bridge[8], Right: MIT Digital Construction Platform[9]
Although material extrusion includes many materials, my focus is on Fused Granular Fabrication (FGF) thermoplastic polymers materials as they are the most common in the industrial design field. Thermopiles become pliable or moldable at a specific elevated temperature and solidify upon cooling (ABS, PLA, Acrylic, Nylon, Polyethylene).?
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[1]?Source:?https://bigrep.com/
[2]?Source:?https://www.3dplatform.com/
[3]?Source:?https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/blackbelt-unveils-3d-printer-converyor-belt-continuous-fdm-printing-112680/
[4]?Source:?https://www.fleximatter.com/
[9]?Source:?https://www.media.mit.edu/
Inventor, Industrial Manufacturing, 3d Printing, Additive Manufacturing, Design Engineering, Software Development, CAD/CAM/CAE, Technology Director
2 年I believe using solar charged synchronized AI robots this structure could be made without the large equipment shown here. Two robot vehicles fetches the sand and mortar, the other mixes it and loads into another robot that layers it down. All timed and sequenced.