ADITIVE MANUFACTURE FOR NATURAL FIBERS

OBJECTIVE

To study the development of novel advanced manufacturing processes for Biopolymers, I built an extrusion system for viscous materials—this project aimed to develop an Open-Hardware workflow to accelerate the adoption of biodegradable materials for digital fabrication. The project’s final goal was to provide fabrication means that rely on locally fabricated and abundant raw materials to isolated communities at a large scale.

I designed an extrusion system that could transform any commercial 3D printer into a biopolymer 3D printer with those goals in mind. Moreover, the system had to work with different materials.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

I built an extrusion platform for viscous materials. This platform included:

A characterization of input parameters for the slicer configuration resulted in several print profiles for different materials (you can download them from here) for CURA software.

Auger screw-based extruder, with a design that was machine agnostic. Moreover, it could work for different material feeders. In addition, two feed systems were designed—a pneumatic system based on air pressure extrusion. And a mechanical system based on a piston extrusion.

The development of an Arduino Shield “BioFeeder.” This shield could control a mechanical extrusion system (based on a stepper motor and a piston), and a pneumatic extrusion system based on an air pump. Moreover, the pneumatic extrusion system included a closed-loop PID system that kept the air pressure inside the extrusion system constant as the material flowed out.

The system worked for different materials. We tested the resulting extrusion systems with clay and various biopolymer during the project’s scopes during the project’s scope, such as; lignin-based, wood cellulose-based, eggshell, and wood ashes.

Wood Pulp

Wood Ashes

Ligning + Wood Pulp

RESULTS

Undegradute Thesis. You can download the thesis document here and the presentation from here.

This work was selected as one of the three Makers Unlimited by Dassault Systems to showcase on-demand at the 3D EXPERIENCE WORLD 2021.

The results were presented at the Fab 15 Conference in Egypt.