Session: 06-04-01 Design for Additive Manufacturing I

Paper Number: 71083

Start Time: Friday, 12:25 PM

71083 - Design and Development of Pellets/granules Extrusion System for Additive Manufacturing 

Nowadays, extrusion based aAdditive mManufacturing (AM) is one of the most popular AM technology that due to, its simple design and economic availability. Extrusion based AM again could be classified categorized in two categories based on the form of the input material used.– In first category, one, which does accept feed material is in the form of wire/ (also called filament), called fFused filament fabrication (FFF). In FFF technology, filament pushed inside a heated chamber using extruder motor and teethed wheel, inside heated chamber this filament converted into semi-solid form and extruded out of nozzle to fabricate the part. In, second category feed material is in the form of granules or/and or pellets, generally called as Pelletspellets/granules-based extrusion process. Pellets/granules are fed into heated chamber using a mechanism and these pellets/granules are melted followed by extrusion out of nozzle to deposit the layer on a build platform.  -extrusion based AMHowever, studies on the development of commercial 3D printers based on pellets/granules extrusion was usually neglected. Moreover, .commercially available wire-based 3D printers are limited by their material availability in the form of wire. To overcome this limited material utilization in commercially available 3D printers, FFF technology is generally available in market in the form of 3D printers while pellet extrusion-based AM is still in development phase and it can’t be utilized in 3D printer. This study supports pellet extrusion additive manufacturing along with conventionally available 3D printers for the utilisation of wide range of materials which is restricted in conventional printers due to unavailability of different wire form materials. As, the feed material for FFF technology should be in wire form, so it limits the variety of feed material due to the constrained in forming the wire with flexibility within a certain limit. So, in this study initial efforts have been made to design and develop a pellets/granules-extruder, which does accept a wide range of materials which are generally available in the market for conventional manufacturing processes. The developed extruder design contains an extrusion screw which is used to feed the pellets/granules form material passing through hopper to heated chamber. unlike the filament extruder where extruder motor pushes the filament inside the heated chamber. However, in this design extruder motor rotates the extrusion screw to feed the material. Hence,  the developed extruder increases the scope of applications of extrusion based additive manufacturing using the variety of commercially available pellet form material. Further, flexible materials and the material which can’t be converted into filament, could also be used as feed material in the form of pellets/granules by using the developed system to fabricate part for different industrial applications. As, it will help to enhance the features in 3D printed part, like – colour variation and mechanical properties variation by using developed system. The design of the present extruder has been developed using modular approach to reduce the complexity of installation of it on different 3D printers and CNC systems. The compact size, low weight and interchangeability were the cost-effective features that have been incorporated during the development of this system. As, waste generation in case of additive manufacturing is almost negligible, but it will also help to reuse the waste generated by failed part during 3D printing along with polymer waste obtained from various other sources.

Presenting Author: Krishnanand . Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology

Authors:

Krishnanand . Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology
Mohammad Taufik Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India