SBIR Phase II: Increasing Maker Manufacturing through 3D Printing with Reclaimed Plastic & Direct Drive Pellet Extrusion

Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) offers tremendous benefit for rapid prototyping, mass customization, and low cost fabrication. This creates an untapped opportunity to develop the technology further to support low volume industrial manufacturing for price sensitive and emerging markets. The ability to source locally available raw material and feed it directly as pellets or shavings into a printer rather than extruded filament is extremely advantageous for both manufacturer and end user in regards to reducing cost and increasing capabilities in prototyping. The benefits of this innovation is amplified when 3D printing large-scale industrial objects (defined as > 18 inches cubed). First, the production of large-scale products represent 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 it addresses the need to print faster. Finally, a dependence on extruded thermoform plastics limits the available library for printing and the ability to mix materials to engineer new formulations. With domain expertise in large-scale 3D FFF printing, re:3D proposes to evolve a prototype pellet 3D printer developed under Phase I to be able to address all of these needs by coupling direct drive pellet extrusion technology with a grinder, dryer and feeding system optimized for reclaimed plastics. re:3D intends to leverage Phase I research conducted on material requirements for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polypropylene (PP), two of the most available reclaimed plastics worldwide, to further optimize the pellet printer to be able to accept reclaimed flake as well as non uniform pellets. This effort will include developing the ability to consistently dry the input materials and to easily clean and switch between materials. A novel mechanism for feeding larger volumes of pellets and/or flake into the platform will also be developed with the requisite controls. Once complete, the company will pilot the solution in Texas through IC2 as well as in Puerto Rico, an island territory with a complicated supply chain, in conjunction with waste streams/partners identified by the Puerto Rico Science & Research Trust. The new hardware integration solutions developed in Phase 2 will be incorporated into the Phase I prototype platform which leveraged Michigan Technological University's (MTU) prior work conducting validation and materials testing in Phase I, prior work modifying direct drive recyclebots for FFF 3D printers, and open source firmware and software research. To ensure excellence, prototypes will be extensively tested using MTU's facilities with reclaimed PP and PET in prints to be used for casting, mold production and load bearing applications. Once the prototype design for commercial scalability has been validated at MTU and field-tested, all progress will be openly documented and shared in an effort to scale the solution suite to multiple platforms as quickly as possible. The hardware will be sold commercially after completing the project as both an integrated 3D printing solution and also as independent hardware due to the potential to be applied beyond Cartesian 3D printing systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.