{"id":633,"date":"2018-10-23T09:30:35","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T13:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ti3d\/?p=633"},"modified":"2018-10-23T15:51:38","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T19:51:38","slug":"researching-flexible-printing-filament-and-resin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ti3d\/2018\/10\/23\/researching-flexible-printing-filament-and-resin\/","title":{"rendered":"Researching Flexible Printing Filament and Resin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Up until 2015 or so, there were very few plastics and resins for their respective types of 3D printers.\u00a0 Since then, there has been much work done to develop new an interesting resins and plastics for specialized uses, e.g., plastic\u00a0filament with metal filings, carbon fiber, or even wood chips and resins that are electrically conductive.<\/p>\n

Lately, we have been exploring the use of flexible resins and plastic filament.\u00a0 Both the printer manufacturers and 3rd party consumables manufacturers have been developing resins and filaments that remain somewhat flexible after printing.\u00a0 Think of a flexible yet sturdy phone case that is rubbery enough to slip onto a phone but strong enough to withstand repeated wear and tear and drops.<\/p>\n

For the Form2, Formlabs has a black flexible resin.\u00a0 Some of the downsides are\u00a0that the design needs to be printed with thick support attachment points due to the flexible material that may not hold the part as rigid as needed for alignment between layers while printing.\u00a0 Further, the item cannot be very thin for the same reason.\u00a0 For example, printing a phone case fairly vertically will cause small variations in the orientation of the part when it prints the next layer, and this can cause a waviness between layers (pictures to come).\u00a0 I’ve also tried using 3rd party resin because they are available in a few colors or even translucent.\u00a0 The first print resulted in an awesome piece (see below) – a dendritic mathematical growth that is quite coral-like.\u00a0 However, the resin from ApplyLabWork failed miserably as it caused the resin to adhere better to the silicone\u00a0base layer (PDMS) than the build platform and caused irreparable damage to the resin tank.<\/p>\n

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For the Ultimaker 3 printer, I have been testing NinjaFlex filament.\u00a0 It is a flexible filament that is not ordinarily compatible with bowden\u00a0printers like the Ultimaker, but one can buy super-slick bowden\u00a0tubes to reduce the friction between the filament and the tube as the extrusion\u00a0motor forces the filament through the tube and into the printhead where it melts and eventually extruded.\u00a0 The first several print jobs failed; however, I found that I can adjust the extruder motor to maximize the tension on the filament and then the filament extrudes more evenly.\u00a0In the first test, I only tested its ability to be extruded and adhere to a print already in progress.\u00a0 Fortuitously, I needed a golden filament to print an award label for a chili cookoff\u00a0tag so I used the gold flexible filament to print the lettering.\u00a0\u00a0The print came out surprisingly well considering I could not get the filament to extrude at all until I increased the extruder motor tension on the filament to its maximum.\u00a0 Next, I tried a skeleton from Thingiverse.\u00a0 I used 50% infill but am wondering if 100% would do better.\u00a0 Here is the outcome:<\/p>\n