Development granular extruder

hello world!

We are new on this forum and what to make first a short presentation of us an our development. We are a team of two guys from Bavaria in Germany. Since 6 months we´re working on a very precisely Aluminium-Version of the Makerbot. Further we are developing a granulates-extruder and today we had our first success extruding a long string with granulate as base-material (see pictures). If you are interessted in further informations be patience we will continue the bulletin.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/12/2011 01:23PM by repbotatbavaria.

Looks nice, please post photos of the extruder

And heres the video of the first test:
Granulator on Youtube - the first step

Sounds fun!

So fun, that it's official documentation now:
http://reprap.org/wiki/Faden_Alu_Box

repbotatbavaria, a few thoughts:
You should join reprap-dev-deutsch.

And also reprap-dev, our "official technical-but-friendly mailing list for all you officially technical-but-friendly people out there":
http://reprap.org/pipermail/reprap-dev/

I think there are some folk in reprap-dev and reprap-dev-deutsch doing a granular extruder. You may want to ping them.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

So, how much does that thing weigh?

We didn´t weighed the granular extruder jet but its maybe around 500gram/1,1lb.

That's really nice.

Repbotatbavaria, what material are you extruding?

And have you managed to print something ans extrude at the same time yet?

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[richrap.blogspot.com]

Hi richrap,

yesterday we had some trouble with the sharpens. Because we designed it too flat the extruded material was moved away. So we haven´t printed something other than our faden
At the moment we use a special material which brought to us by a friend. I can´t remember the name but i will have a look! The target should be to print with every thermoplastic especially self-shreddered waste from packaging or equal. We all produce much of plastic waste so we had the idea to use this instead of a own designed special produced extruder material.

Have a look on the whole extrution-head

Have a look on the whole extrution-head

Neat! Do you think you'll be putting that stuff in the wiki?

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

Sure but i have to look how i can edit the wiki

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2011 08:05PM by repbotatbavaria.

Just log in and click edit, it's easy. You can use german text if you like, we've got a lot of germans in reprap-dev-deutsch.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

... it would be really interesting to test with granules made from lignin (or 'liquid wood') - i have lignin-powder for laser sintering, but with your granule extruder you can use their Arboform-granules ... here a comparison of Arboform vs. plastics: [tecnaro.de]

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

I commend your work, but for the sake of the environment I hope it doesn't catch on.

On the other hand, if your able to extrude custom 3mm or 1.75mm filament for a good price then you could do quite well.

Thanks for showing up this problem but we can tell you that our idea don´t use such material. Once our extruder is able to extrude every kind of plastic we will attach a small "home-work" shredder so you´re able to recycle all your plastic-waste on your own. We are sure that we will meet some problems we can´t see yet but our passion will fix all of these hopefully

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/13/2011 03:29PM by repbotatbavaria.

Now you have my attention

The shop I go to each day for my rocket fuel, gives me a PLA lid on the coffee.

I literally just started to save those lids to one day shred and extrude into other parts.

Hi Grogyan

thanks for your attention and thanks for a nice idea! We will try during next weekend to extrude some shredderd lids and look if and how this will work! Stay tuned!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2011 08:06PM by repbotatbavaria.

We work it out and now our granulates-extruder ist doing his first job. The head is made of kevlar to have a good insulation we also use Peek but in case of changing the heating from a wire to heatinbound we need a bigger diameter so we had to change. The bot itself is a cnc milled aluminium construction in a advanced Reprap-Design wit a very high accurancy of a tenth more milimeter on xyz-axis, linear ball bearings and trapezoidthread rods. The design is not printable but got the opportunity to built it relativly easy. The idea is building a machine which can handle every plastic which can used in a extruder. Because we have lots of plastics in every day live it should be possible to use this waste in the machine to print out new articles on your own. Also it is an idea to give such printers to communitys to start up printing all of that awesome RepRap Designs

The first steps are done!

Some of the community asked already for plans and drawings of our builts. We will put them online as soon the developement is out of this high-experimental stage.

This really looks promising. I will (as I am sure many others are) watch this space closely.

Great stuff. Some ideas for the videos themselves:

Put some additional details for your videos in the notes, specifically of the following:

Material type being extruded.
Granule size/type (eg: pellets from x, hand-cut, shredded, etc).
X/Y Axis speeds & Extruder flow rate speed.
Extruder temperature.
Bed surface material and temp.
Object you are trying to print (eg: link to Thingiverse).

Part of this helps share information with others. It also allows others to help you (eg: extruding temp is too high or extruder flow rate is too fast). Lastly, it documents all your work so that if you have a problem later, you can go back and see if this same sort of problem affected a different plastic/setup. How you solved that issue then may help you solve your new issue.

Hi,

There's been a recent thread on the mailing list about extruding 3mm filament from granules. Do you think that would be difficult using your concept? If that can be done, you could mount the larger granulate extruder (pre-extruder) somewhere nearby, and give it a large supply of granules, which is then extruded to 3mm filament that works as a never ending supply to all existing extruders.

Cheers, Ketil

Hi Ketil,

we are working on a adaption but our main target is to develop a granulate-extruder for printers like Makerbot. To use with Reprap we have the problem of weight (1,5kg/3,3lb). But maybe someone can tell us if his makerbot can handle this .

Pace!
Marcel

Makerbot is rather fragile too. Can't you give it a separate mounting frame?

I have a repstrap that would probably have no problem with that weight. It uses two spindles for Z that are driven by dedicated steppers. the spindles can handle a maximum of 90 KG each - so the issue would only be the steppers, if there is an issue at all.

The mounting frame is no problem to produce. Maybe we have to adapt the funnel for the different printers.

Sounds perfect. Out research shows up the need of a little bigger extrusion barrel for a better melting up the materials. So the weight will grow to ∼2,5 kg.

Printheads with that wight only make sense, if you have the extruder mouinted in a way that it only moves in Z. otherwise it will either be slow or need much stronger Steppers

We saw this problem to and are now developing a printer with a xy-bed and a only moving z-axis. As you can see in the video our aluminium rebuilt of the mendel as no problems to move but i might be because the mechanic is very smooth operating. The other idea is to remove the granulate-extruder completly from the printer just creating 3mm filament.

... or print 'upside-down' with a stationary extruder and the building plate floating above - the printed parts are ways lighter than the extruder ...

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Excactly what we are plannig.