The main printer used for SLS printing is the Sintratec printer. I assisted with the assembly of the printer and was the lead on the operation of the printer. The main materials printed with the Sintratec were PA-12 and TPE; both of which are Sintratec brand materials. This printer was involved in 3 government funded projects.
The Peopoly Moai printer is an SLA type printer. Modifications were made to the print bed and vat of the printer to allow for smaller material to be used as well as a heating/cooling system. I aided with the design of the new modifications. This project was government funded.
In the research lab I worked in at RIT, there are 3 LCD printers (Monoprice mini LCD, Kudo3D Bean, and Elegoo Mars) and one DLP printer (Kudo3D Titan 2HR). All of these were for a government funded project that involved the classification of different LCD and DLP printers for development in a new type of LCD printer. I learned each of the printers software as well as how to accurately print with each machine.
This research involved supercritical drying gels with liquid CO2. For this project, I assisted in the making of the gels as well as the supercritical drying step. Clean room access was granted to me by the school in order to make the gel. Once the gel is made, it is placed into a manuclave that is then sealed shut. CO2 is then released into the manuclave and pressurized into liquid. The gel then sits in the liquid for ~24 hours until it is hardened. Once the gel is removed from the tank it is durable and acts as a perfect insulator.
The project ended when a microsized tube was coated with an aerogel to prove the gel can be used as insulation. This project was not funded and therefore was dropped because of all the other funded projects available.
GMB, or granular material binding, is a general term to describe printers that deposit or sinter powder layer by layer to create a part. For this project, a custom printer was designed to deposit a liquid binder onto reactive powder to create an energetic part. My role was to aid a professor in design, assembly and operation of the printer. I also hand coded each part from g-code since it is a custom machine.
In the summer of 2018, the printer successfully produced its first print and proved the ability to use GMB to bind reactive powder. After this, the printer was fully funded and a second iteration is underway.
The TMJ, or the temporomandibular joint, can be found at the end of a human jaw. This joint has surrounding cartilage that can deteriorate overtime causing pain. To better understand the joint, doctors at the University of Rochester wanted to know the forces applied to the joint when opening and closing the mouth.
For ethical reasons, human heads were not used for testing. Therefore, sheep heads were placed in a tensile tester at different angles to find the maximum force applied to the TMJ when the sheep mouth is open and closed. Sheep heads were used instead because they have a similar TMJ structure to humans with less ethical backing. All sheep heads were collected from a local butcher. No sheep was killed specifically for the project. For this project, I assisted in the preparation and testing of the heads and analysed the resulting data.
Zmorph is an FDM style printer that brings together laser engraving, FDM printing, syringe extrusion, and CNC milling. The program used with this printer is from Voxelizer. With this machine, I focused on FDM printing with the dual nozzle. Zmorph was one of the first printing companies to offer a dual extrusion nozzle that mixed two filament materials together while printing. This allowed their printer to excel in gradient prints (100% of material 1 to 100% of material 2 from bottom to top of the print) and prints of specific material mixtures (30% of material 1 and 70% of material 2 for the whole print).
There were many challenges with printing using a dual nozzle of this type. One main problem is the system put in place to mix the materials together consisted of a small twisted piece of metal at the tip of the nozzle. The twisted piece was a sound idea, but the execution ended up missing the mark and caused the material to not be mixed at all. To mitigate this, the metal piece was sliced and twisted even more to allow the materials to make contact in the nozzle tip before being extruded. This solved some of the problem, but created more bleeding of one material to another when only trying to print one material at a time. This was solved by creating a long brim around the wanted part to purge the material and ensure the wanted mixture is being printed.
Lulzbot is a widely used FDM printer in industry and R&D (Research and Design). Lulzbot is unique because all printer head components are open source and mainly 3D printed. This allows for easy innovation and repair of any of their printing nozzles. The program used with the printer is Cura. All projects using Lulzbot were government funded.
I aided in the design and manufacturing of a personalized Flexy-Dually extruder that consisted of one side FDM and the other side syringe extrusion. This extruder was designed from the existing Flexy-Dually that had both sides for FDM, one for regular filament and one for flexible filament. I also hand coded g-code for testing the functionality of the head. This project was government funded.
There were many challenges that occurred for both the software and hardware in this project. Many of the software challenges were fixed with manual adjustment of the g-code exported from Cura. The hardware components were either fixed by redesigning the nozzle, or by calling the company and looking at the main circuit board.
The Hyrel 30M printer was one of the first printers used for research in the army. This printer has an open nozzle design which allows for easy manipulation and innovation. Me and one other student used this printer to look at the forces and pressures applied to a material while printing with an FDM nozzle. The project was both experimental and computational with a CFD, or computational fluid dynamics, analysis to confirm the results of the experiment. This study was written as a controlled conference paper and was government funded.
PVA, or polyvinyl alcohol, is a common support material in FDM due to its solubility in water. For this project, a complicated part was printed with PVA in an FDM printer. This part was then submerged in epoxy and then water to dissolve the PVA. The remaining epoxy could then be used as a cast for another material. My role was to design and manufacture the part and holder and test the concept for the project. This project was government funded.
This research involved the adherence of 2 acrylic materials with a specialized epoxy. My job was to tensile and compression test all the adhered parts to see if the epoxy worked on the given material. I completed all of the testing and data analysis for the project. This was the first research project I did as a lead researcher. This research partnered with a dentist at the University of Rochester.