A.P.E. for 3D Printers

Background

I worked as a researcher in the Structural Electronic Materials Lab at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced). Dr. Yue (Jessica) Wang supervises this lab. My job at the lab was machine building and multi-material 3D Printing.

Project description

Multi-material D.I.W. (Direct Ink Write) Printers can be expensive ($20,000 - $200,000) and often intended for biological applications. We built a D.I.W. 3D Printer that is low cost (<$700) and designed with our lab applications in mind.

We purchased an inexpensive 2-material desktop Fused Deposition Molding 3D Printer as a team. This way, we could attach a syringe pump extruder to each motor. I designed the Attachable Paste Extruder (A.P.E.), a syringe pump extruder customized for our lab applications that can be attached to a desktop or an FDM 3D Printer to print with pastes as well as the accompanying two-material nozzle. The A.P.E. design modifies the Large Volume Syringe Pump Extruder [1]. My biggest challenge was achieving cleaner and more reliable prints: optimizing material rheology, coding custom printer G-Code, and creating a novel nozzle design. After testing a one-nozzle system inspired by recent multi-material 3D Printing advances at Harvard University, we achieved multi-material prints in the figures shown below [2].

Reflection

This work advanced my overall knowledge of FDM, D.I.W., and S.T.L. 3D Printing.

References

1. Puscha, K. Hinton, T. Feinbergab, A. 2018, 'Large volume syringe pump extruder for desktop 3D printers', HardwareX, vol. 3, pp. 49-61.

2. Skylar-Scott, M. Mueller, J. Visser, C. Lewis, J. 2019 'Voxelated soft matter via multimaterial multinozzle 3D printing', Nature, vol 575, pp. 330-335.