Hello everyone,
The theme for this week at the Wayne College Makerspace is recycling! 3D printing is far from a perfect process; a good deal of the plastic used results in failed prints. To save costs (and the environment) we plan to recycle our waste plastic into usable filament. Thanks to another grant from the Romich Foundation, we ordered a filament extruder and a plastic grinding machine:
Recycling filament is a relatively new idea in the 3D printing world. In addition to recycling old plastic, we can purchase plastic pellets instead of plastic filament. We can then make our own filament at a tenth the cost of pre-made filament. We’ll keep you posted when this project begins!
Dusty, our resident mad scientist, is developing a method to recycle used limonene into fresh solution. In our dual-head printer, we use dissolvable filament to print complex objects. Limonene dissolves this filament, but the spent solution has dissolved plastic in it and is disposed. Through steam vacuum distillation, Dusty extracts the limonene from the spent solution so that we can use it again.
The system basically works; he is refining the process to prevent breaking down the limonene components, ultimately to design a machine that automates this process.
Kevin Platz, executive director of the Orrville Boys and Girls Club, brought almost a dozen kids to the Makerspace today to learn about the 3D printers. They kids were clearly excited! We plan to make a trip to their location with the portable printer to teach them more.
Kevin also delivered a new addition to the Wayne College Makerspace, a 3D scanner! The scanner is loaned to us from the Orrville Boys and Girls Club, the beginning of a collaborative effort with Wayne College to teach STEM skills to these kids. A 3D scanner allows physical objects to be imported into a CAD program for modification or directly duplicating objects on a 3D printer.
Here is Dusty setting up the scanner for the first time:
Stay tuned as we learn more about the 3D scanner, the filament extruder arriving next week, and a future field trip to the Boys and Girls Club!
Learn how researchers are using 3D printers to make blood vessels using sugar based molecules for the vessels and hydrogel to produce a cast:
http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/02/3d-printed-blood-vessels
Stay tuned as we learn more about the 3D scanner, the filament extruder arriving next week, and a future field trip to the Boys and Girls Club!
Tom