Design and Development of Pellets/Granules Extrusion System for Additive Manufacturing

Abstract Fused filament fabrication (FFF) is one of the state-of-art and most popular extrusion-based additive manufacturing technology. This technology is popular due to its affordability, simple design, and compact size. In FFF technology, a wire form polymer material called filament is pushed inside a heated chamber using an extruder motor and teethed wheel. In a heated chamber, this filament is converted into semi-solid form and extruded out of the nozzle to fabricate the part. Producing the wire from raw polymer increases the cost as well as limits the used material up to such polymers, which could form a thin and long, continuous, and uniform wire with certain rigidity and other mechanical properties. Hence, the use of filament increases the cost of FFF technology and available wire-based 3D printers are limited by their material availability in the form of wire. These limitations could be eliminated by using a screw-based extrusion mechanism, in which feed materials would be used in pellets or granules form. Since studies on the development of commercial 3D printers based on pellets/granules extrusion were usually neglected. Hence, in this study initial efforts have been made to design and develop a pellets/granules-extruder, which does accept a wide range of materials that are generally available in the market for conventional manufacturing processes. Further, flexible materials and the material which can’t be converted into filament could also be used as feed material in the form of pellets/granules by using the developed system to fabricate a part for different industrial applications.