Creating Value from Base Waste with Translation to Austere Environments: 3D Printing in Mobile Recycling Facilities

Contested environments present unique challenges for maintaining equipment or prototyping on-demand solutions in Air Force operations. Resource scarcity and regional considerations must be anticipated in advance in order to ensure that all necessary materials are forward deployed. Operational missions can be further complicated by potentially unpredictable resupply of essential materials and equipment. Consequently, excessive amounts of costly on-demand inventory often must be pre-positioned in case of aging equipment failure or compromised reserve replenishment. These considerations can constrain innovative autonomy, increase supply chain costs and delay fulfilling mission objectives. Recent manufacturing advancements offer potential locally-based alternatives to reduce the dependence on materials and equipment otherwise imported into theater using 3D printing. However, the ability to produce functional 3D prints is contingent on access to input materials, which can degrade over time. Specifically, the ability to source locally available raw material and feed it directly as pellets or shavings/flake into a printer rather than extruded filament could be extremely advantageous for the warfighter by reducing cost and increasing capabilities in prototyping and on demand fabrication. Further, the ability to use plastic waste as a feedstock has the added benefit of reducing supply chain costs, achieving sustainability goals, and allowing plastic waste to become a useful by-product of innovation. The benefits of this innovation are amplified when 3D printing large-scale industrial objects (defined as > 18 inches cubed). First, the production of large-scale products represents a larger investment of time and material costs (pellets are ~ 1/10th the cost of filament). A second reason for the importance of pellet extrusion is the ability to print significantly faster. With domain expertise in large-scale 3D printing, re:3D has developed a pellet extrusion 3D printer capable of printing with pellets and able to accept reclaimed flake as well as non-uniform pellets. This effort includes developing the ability to consistently dry and to easily clean and switch between materials. A novel mechanism for feeding larger volumes of pellets and/or flake into the platform is also being developed with the requisite controls as well as a desktop grinding system.  Possible AF users of this hardware have expressed interest packaging this equipment in footprint optimized for DoD benefit.  This award would allow for the opportunity to customize a full suite of hardware to enable the processing of waste for 3D printing. Specifally, re:3D proposes to analyze the plastic waste created at USAFA, to determine which of those plastics can be printed, and to created a system to allow for the printing of parts, drones and other items directly from trash in a containerized 3D printing Mobile Recycling Facility (MRF).