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Carbon Announces Changes to Executive Leadership Team and Board of Directors

Today, Carbon announced that it has appointed Ellen J. Kullman as Lead Independent Director of its Board of Directors. In addition, the company appointed Deborah M. Messemer to its Board of Directors and promoted Elisa D. Martel to Chief Financial Officer. Martel will chair Carbon’s newly formed Audit Committee.

“These strategic updates to Carbon’s Board and executive team strengthen our corporate governance and are in line with our maturing as a company,” said Dr. Joseph DeSimone, Carbon’s CEO and Co-founder. “Ellen, Debbie and Elisa are extraordinary executives with histories of strong leadership and business acumen, and the deep experience each of them brings is invaluable to the continued growth and success for Carbon.”

Ellen J. Kullman

Kullman served as Chair of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of DuPont from January 2009 to October 2015. During her tenure, she helped to stimulate growth and position the company to be a leader with its scientific and market knowledge. Even before being named CEO, she was helping the company to survive the financial crisis of 2008, moving it away from commoditized businesses and establishing it as a market-driven scientific company.

Kullman has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Tufts University and a Master of Science in Management from the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University. She is also a member of the boards of of directors of United Technologies Corporation, Dell Technologies, Amgen, and Goldman Sachs, as well as serving on the board of trustees of Northwestern University and the board of overseers of Tufts School of Engineering. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and co-chairs Paradigm for Parity, a coalition of business leaders dedicated to addressing the corporate leadership gender gap.

“It has been an honor to serve on Carbon’s Board of Directors, and I am very much looking forward to continuing to work with this dynamic, deeply invested team as we embark on Carbon’s next chapter,” said Kullman. “With its powerful fusion of hardware subscriptions, cloud-based software updates, and ongoing resin sales, Carbon’s ground-breaking Hybrid-SaaS business model is a powerful new entry in the connected-products business world. Hybrid SaaS combines the long-term revenue predictability of SaaS with the greatly accelerated growth potential enabled by large-scale manufacturing systems, giving Carbon the opportunity to scale at unprecedented speed.”

Deborah M. Messemer

Messemer served as the Managing Partner of KPMG’s Bay Area and Northwest region until her retirement in September of this year. In that position, she led more than 3,000 team members in 10 offices across all functions, including audit, tax and advisory. She was honored as Financial Woman of the Year by the Financial Women of San Francisco (FWSF) in 2016, and for more than seven years was consistently named as one of the Bay Area’s Most Influential Women in Business by the San Francisco Business Times.

Messemer also serves on the board of directors for Allogene Therapeutics, and has been on several other non-profit and advisory boards including the Bay Area Council, the San Francisco Committee on Jobs, the California Chamber of Commerce, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the UC Berkeley Fisher Center Policy Advisory Board, San Francisco Ballet, and Posse. She is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) and the San Francisco Chapter of Women Corporate Directors (WCD). Messemer has a Bachelor in Accounting from the University of Texas at Arlington.

“I am very excited to join the Carbon Board, and look forward to contributing to the company’s growth and market leadership across a vast array of industry sectors,” said Messemer. “The era of digital manufacturing is here, delivering digital design and fabrication, QA/QC and end-to-end, data-centric production solutions.Carbon is uniquely poised to be one of the most significant manufacturing innovators of our day.”

Elisa de Martel

De Martel has been acting as Vice President of Finance for Carbon since February 2018 and is responsible for the company’s overall financial activities and global finance organization. Before that, she was with Apple Inc. for 11 years, most recently as Director of Manufacturing Finance. Prior to that, she was a a finance manager with Citroen UK and a supervisor at PricewaterhouseCoopers. De Martel earned a Master’s degree in Political Economy from the University of Essex, and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the EDHEC Business School.

“Carbon is disrupting the manufacturing industry with a connected, software-first, digital solution,” de Martel said. “I am delighted to be part of this team, and look forward to contributing to Carbon’s continued growth as we expand our ecosystem and deliver on our deep commitment to enabling our customers to move to mass digital and sustainable production at scale.”

Discuss this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts below.

Hourglass Lamp With Animated Light

This great project was sent in by Emil on the blog The Practical Engineer:

In this weeks video I’m making an hourglass lamp with light effects that simulate the falling sand when you turn the lamp upside down.

Another cool feature I build into it is the on / off switch, this is hidden inside the lamp and turns on by putting the lamp on the right side. Turning it upside down then turns off the light.

To simulate the sand that is falling I used some Neopixels from Adafruit powered from an Arduino. I chose these because they are relatively simple to program and you don’t need to work with transistors etc. that would be required when dimming regular leds.

Learn more!

Mathieu Stern Made a Camera Lens with an Iceberg #celebratephotography

This is just way too cool. From Mathieu Stern on YouTube:

Now the facts :

– First of all the life-span of a lens made of ice is very short, so you can’t move very far from where you create the lens.

– Focusing is extremely hard because of the water melting on the lens itslef.

– Shaping one ” lens” takes 45 min because of the ambiant cold.

– If your lens breaks in the mold, you have to start all over again

– I hacked a Japanese cocktail ice ball maker to create half spheres.

– The housing of the lens was made using a home made 3D print model.

– All photos where shot during the 1 minute of the last ice lens.

– The video at the beginning of the video was shot in the last usable seconds of the last ice lens.

– No I didn’t ruined my camera with water damages, even if it was pretty dangerous, I managed to keep the inside dry.

Now if people asks me “Are you happy with the result ? it’s a bunch of blurry photos !?”, my response would be : “this project is a scientific, artistic and poetic project, I never imagined the result would look like the photos that comes from an ultra modern lens, but I was amazed by the strange beauty of the images I made with the first ever 10 000 year old lens.”

This is not a project for everyday photography, it was an adventure and a bet that when you have a crazy hypothesis, you should do everything to experiment it in the field.

Photofooter

We #celebratephotography here at Adafruit every Saturday. From photographers of all levels to projects you have made or those that inspire you to make, we’re on it! Got a tip? Well, send it in!

If you’re interested in making your own project and need some gear, we’ve got you covered. Be sure to check out our Raspberry Pi accessories and our DIY cameras.

3D Printing News Briefs: November 3, 2018

In this month’s first edition of 3D Printing News Briefs, we’re starting again with news about formnext, before moving on to other business news, a medical story, and a case study. Mimaki will be bringing over 10 million colors to formnext, and M. Holland has signed a distribution agreement with 3DXTECH. Some exciting medical news out of South Korea – the country’s first chest transplant using 3D printing has been successfully completed. Finally, LulzBot published a case study about its work to help produce a haunting stop-motion animation short film.

Mimaki Showcasing Over 10 Million Colors at formnext

At formnext in Frankfurt later this month, Mimaki will be bringing its advanced, full-color 3D printing technology, under the theme of ‘Shape the Future in Colour.’ Its 3DUJ-553 3D printer, which offers consistent results in over 10 million colors, will be running live during the event so visitors can see the super fine, photorealistic detail it offers. In addition, through a collaborative project with Materialise, Mimaki’s 3D printed models are currently available under the name Multicolor+ through i.materialise. These models, 3D printed in UV-cured photopolymer resins with inkjet printing heads, have a strength that’s higher than other color 3D printing technologies and can be handled directly off the 500 x 500 x 300 mm build plate of the 3DUJ-553.

“Materialise is currently trialling Mimaki’s full-colour 3D printing technology. The material, Multicolor+, allows us to create smooth surfaces with vibrant colours that enhance the value of a finished object. Multicolor+ offers more vivid and intense colours and enables stronger, sturdier materials with a minimum wall thickness of 1mm. It also allows for printing interlocking parts. As a result, Multicolor+ is ideal for printing decorative parts such as figurines, avatars and architectural models,” said Miranda Bastijns, Materialise Director Manufacturing Online.

Come see Mimaki’s full-color 3D printing capabilities for yourself at booth D26 in Hall 3.1 at formnext, November 13-16.

M. Holland Signs New Distribution Agreement

This spring, international thermoplastic resins distributor M. Holland signed its first 3D printing product distribution agreement with Owens Corning to sell the company’s XSTRAND product line. Now, the company has announced that it signed its second distribution agreement, this time with Michigan-based manufacturer and supplier of high-performance 3D printing materials and parts 3DXTECH. This agreement will provide M. Holland’s industrial manufacturing clients with access to a larger team of commercial and technical support resources, in addition to adding over 24 materials, like carbon fiber and fire-retardant materials, to the company’s current 3D printing product portfolio.

“At M. Holland, our mission is to give our industrial clients agnostic advice about how to integrate 3D printing into their operations to create value. The 3DXTECH product line gives us a full portfolio of high quality, engineering-grade materials, which we can marry with objective recommendations about methods and machinery to deliver the optimal solutions to our clients,” said Haleyanne Freedman, M. Holland’s global 3D printing and additive manufacturing engineering specialist.

South Korea Completes First Local Chest Transplant Using 3D Printing

3D printed sternum model

A 55-year-old man, who chooses to remain anonymous, has just received the first chest transplant using 3D printing in the country of South Korea. Following Spain, Italy, the US, Britain, and China, this makes it the sixth nation in the world to complete this amazing medical innovation. The patient had a malignant tumor in his thorax, and while he’d had four other surgeries and anti-cancer drugs in the past, these conventional methods did not ultimately work, and the cancer returned to his body.

“All of a sudden, the patient once again was feeling pain, and the lump on his chest became clearly visible. This meant the cancer had grown resistant,” explained Professor Park Byung-Joon with Chung-Ang University Hospital. ” We felt the new treatment was necessary and so we had to perform surgery urgently.”

He knew that 3D printing could help customize treatments for patients. Together with the rest of his team, Professor Park created a 3D printed breastbone for the patient that would have been nearly impossible to create with other methods of manufacturing. The hope is that this 3D printed chest transplant will help spur additional innovation in South Korea.

To learn more, watch the video below:

LulzBot Helps Produce Stop-Motion Animation

Dale Hayward and Sylvie Trouvé of Montreal-based See Creature Animation, together with the National Film Board of Canada, have been working together for the past three years to produce the short film Bone Mother, a stop-motion animation version of the Slavic folklore tale of the witch Baba Yaga. For the first time, See Creature decided to use 3D printing, and chose the LulzBot Mini as the affordable, reliable machine they needed to create nearly the entire film with 3D printing. Then, the team decided to add three more to the studio, due to how much 3D printing was required – over 1,500 unique faces were needed, and See Creature used woodfill PLA by colorFabb, with a light infill, to make them. Adjustments were also made to reduce print precision, as one character needed plenty of wrinkles.

“Our main character, Baba Yaga is an ancient witch and naturally she should have wrinkles. So instead of sculpting them into the computer model, we found that if we print the face lying down, the layers look like a topographical map and the print naturally accentuated the curves of her face, creating a lot of the wrinkles for us,” Hayward explained. “We loved the look and it fit her character so much that we actually lowered the resolution to get even more stepping.”

“Where technology has forced traditional hand-drawn animation to adapt or fade away, stop-motion has always ridden the tech wave, so much so that there has become a renaissance of stop-motion films over the last decade. This is attributed to technologies like 3D printing…. they have opened the doors to greater creative possibilities at a lower budget.”

Bone Mother, which clocks in at less than nine minutes, recently premiered in Toronto. See it for yourself below:

Discuss these stories and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the comments below.

3devo Introduces Two New Series of Filament Extruders

3devo is a young company known for its filament extruders, which include the NEXT 1.0 and the 3devo Advanced. The Dutch company also markets a plastic shredder as part of its mission to simplify the making and recycling of filament. Now 3devo has announced two new series of products, the Precision Series and Composer Series filament makers. According to 3devo, the new filament makers further simplify the material fabrication process.

“Our NEXT filament maker found numerous amounts of applications in industries ranging from education and research to manufacturing and aerospace,” 3devo says. “They brought users a variety of benefits including shorter lead times, reduced material waste, and increased control over material making. Also, they facilitated material research and customization, while introducing the precision of industrial filament making to desktop-based setups. However, we realized that our filament makers could serve these purposes even better – if they focused on specific requirements. Our new Precision and Composer Series filament makers are specialized, result-oriented machines aimed at simplifying the material making process. Each in a different way.”

The Precision Series of filament makers allows mass production of 3D printer filament at faster speed and with improved diameter accuracy. It features a high-flow extruder screw that allows filament to be produced without losing tolerances one the diameter.

The Composer Series is designed for material mixing and experimentation. Users can develop custom filament from a wide variety of polymers and additives. It features a mixing screw that delivers high-quality material mixing and compounding.

Both series have two additional models that address material-specific requirements. The Precision 350 and the Composer 350 can handle temperatures up to 350°C, meaning that they can process materials including PLA, ABS, PC, PS, PETG, TPU, TPE, PPS, PA (6,12,66) and more. The Precision 450 and the Composer 450 can – you guessed it – handle temperatures up to 450ºC, allowing them to process high-performance materials such as PAEK family materials such as PEEK, as well as PSU, PTFE, PVDF and more.

The new filament makers have several upgrades and improvements. Each Precision and Composer model comes with an improved extruder system with a new “swappable” design. The entire extruder system, including screw, barrel, die-head, motor and heaters is designed as an independent, removable unit to simplify cleaning, repair and maintenance. Users can easily disassemble and reattach the system on their own.

In addition, the heating system has been upgraded. All Precision and Composer filament makers contain ceramic band heaters with four controllable heating zones. Each heater is handcrafted in-house. The filament makers also have hoppers with closable caps to prevent material contamination. Finally, the new filament makers each feature upgraded software that improves their thermal stability by up to 35%.

3devo has more in the works as well – the company is working on developing a web app with cloud access, which will allow for active data logging of extrusion tests.

You can learn more about the Precision and Composer filament maker series here.

Discuss this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts below.

[Images: 3devo]

German Designer Debuts 3D Printed Christmas Ornament Collection Inspired by the Motion of Dance

Halloween ended just a few days ago, which means that it’s time, at least in the US, to start focusing on the next major autumn holiday – Thanksgiving. But, for many people (not me!), the minute the jack-o’-lanterns and skeletons come down, they tend to bypass putting out the turkey decorations and move right along into setting up the Christmas tree, hanging the stockings by the chimney with care, and dreaming of sugar plums.

I personally don’t start getting in the Christmas spirit until the day after Thanksgiving; I like to think that turkey and pumpkin pie deserve their day in the sun, after all. But no matter what your favorite holiday is, and when you start celebrating it, you can be sure that 3D printing will help make the season bright…or patriotic, romantic, spooky, in a galaxy far far away, and what have you.

One thing we start to hear a lot about come November and December are 3D printed Christmas ornaments, be they traditional, nerdy, inspirational, medical, or even your own face. Designer David Münscher from Germany, who has used 3D printing in the past to make a collection of lampshades, reached out to 3DPrint.com with news of his latest collection: modern 3D printed Christmas ornaments.

“I just released a series of 3d printed Christmas ornaments, that might be of interest to you and your readers. It is inspired by strobe photography of dancers. Since these ornaments capture imprinted motion over time and it is this season of the year I called them “Snowangels,” Münscher told us.

The weightless Snowangels ornament collection takes its simple beauty from what Münscher refers to as “the fluent motion of classic dance moves and dance photography.”

The delicate, white ornaments were inspired by the fluid motion of dance, and were created using an algorithmic design approach that freezes an object’s motion – in this case a dancer – over time into a static sculpture.

Münscher took physical photographs of the angels’ abstract wings during their course of movement, and then traced the motion into a continuous form. While still images, like the ones above, do offer a good idea of how the sculptures change appearance in different perspectives, you really need to see the dynamic forms in motion to best appreciate them.

There are two different Snowangels ornaments available, in two sizes. The first set measures 50 mm, while the second one is 70 mm. 3D printed on demand by Shapeways, the ornaments are made out of a strong polyamide material, which makes them quite durable, even though they appear very delicate.

“Although originally intended as Christmas ornaments the snowangel`s resulting resemblance of abstract butterflies, will make for an interesting home decoration all year around,” Münscher wrote in a release.

Depending on the size, prices for the 3D printed Snowangels ornaments range from $18-30; just visit Oxique to buy yours today. To see these beautiful ornaments as they’re meant to be viewed – in motion – check out the video below.

What do you think? Discuss this story and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the Facebook comments below.

3D Printed Kayaks and Augmented Reality are Part of Saving the Environment with Sweden’s Paper Province

By now, it’s clear that our environment needs a lot of help, or the consequences will be dire. While few seem to agree on what exactly is the best way to combat our environmental issues, plenty of governmental and other organizations across the world are taking important steps, using the resources that are available to them. In Sweden, one of those resources is the heavy forest growth across the country. Paper Province is an industrial cluster that aims to turn away from plastic and toward wood and paper-based products, taking advantage of Sweden’s abundant forest.

But won’t that lead to deforestation problems? Not at all – Paper Province, which is supported by the EU Cohesion Fund, plants three new trees for every one that is harvested, making sure that the forests remain healthy. European Union forests have actually been expanding over the past 60 years, in contrast with the world’s forests which have been shrinking.

One company working in the Paper Province industrial cluster is Melker Kayaks, owned by Pelle Stafshede. Stafshede uses a 3D printer that runs on corn and wood pellets to create his sustainable kayaks.

“I decided that I wanted to do the absolutely best-looking kayaks in the world combined with sustainability, thinking that I would change the industry completely,” he said. “That’s why it all happens when business understands that we also need to see the business value of going into the change from plastic into a fossil free future.”

Stafshede’s wood 3D printer is the largest in the world for that type of material, and it can print an entire kayak in only a few hours. Failed prints are no big deal, as they can easily be shredded and recycled. The kayaks are printed with a honeycomb structure that makes them both stiff and lightweight. 3D printing has shown itself to be an effective method of fabricating kayaks and canoes, and Melker kayaks have the added benefit of being completely sustainable.

Paper Province is heavy on the use of advanced technology, beyond just 3D printing. 21-year-old Sophie is a driver of a gripper crane, which she uses augmented reality glasses to control. She enjoys her work, and points to Paper Province’s emphasis on gender equality in the workplace. The cluster encourages its businesses to hire women in traditionally “male” jobs.

“There are starting to be more and more women in this sector of activity, I think,” Sophie commented. “You see a lot of women driving big trucks like this one, and also other types of trucks.”

Much of the world believes that fossil fuels and plastics are indispensable to industry, but Paper Province is working to prove that that isn’t the case. It’s unlikely that fossil fuels will ever be done away with completely, but environmental initiatives like this one show that our reliance on them doesn’t have to be nearly so heavy – there are, in fact, alternatives. Paper Province is no fringe group, either – currently the cluster has 103 member companies with a total annual turnover of about €2.2 billion.

Concerns have been expressed, justifiably, about 3D printing’s effects on the environment – after all, it does use a lot of plastic. But companies like Melker Kayaks demonstrate that even 3D printing doesn’t have to rely on tons of plastic, but can instead take advantage of more sustainable and recyclable materials.

Discuss this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts below.

[Source: EuroNews]

Interview with Vinod Devan of Deloitte on Their 3D Printing Approach

With 3D printing moving towards broader adoption many companies are now entering our market. One of these is Deloitte. The professional services firm that does everything from accounting to tax and M&A also wants to guide firms into the 3D printing world. We interviewed Vinod Devan, Product Strategy and Operations Lead at Deloitte Consulting to see what the firm’s plans are in 3D printing and how it hopes to help customers.

Why is Deloitte entering the 3D printing market?

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a critical component of the Industry 4.0 digital transformation.AM technology is finally at the point where companies are starting to realize significant, tangible, new value for themselves and their customers. Deloitte is making significant investments in 3D printing knowledge and capabilities so that we can advise and join with our clients as they revolutionize supply chains, product portfolios, and business models.

What competencies does the team have?

At Deloitte, we have incredible depth in supply chain and manufacturing and have been helping companies digitize their operations.This includes product design and development, manufacturing, production design, and in-market management – all of which are impacted by AM. Through our growing ecosystem of collaborators and global alliances with leading hardware and software players in this space, we bring a holistic view of the benefits and impacts of AM and complementary digital technologies.

What kind of projects have you done with customers?

Our projects generally fall into three buckets: Helping clients who are new to additive manufacturing enter the space in a strategic manner, helping clients operationalize and scale their existing – but relatively foundational – AM efforts, and helping clients that are already mature in AM transform and optimize end to end product and supply chain operations. Regardless of the project type, we strive to strike a balance between technical feasibility, business viability, and customer desirability. This approach is necessary for a ‘play to win’ strategy in AM.

What advice could you give me if I was a large manufacturing company and I’d want to get started with 3D printing?

Start small and focus on high value areas – this could be rapid prototyping, production of spare parts, or tooling components.Use this exercise to get comfortable with the technology, economics, and value of 3D printing. Build a roadmap to demonstrate success, and keep expanding the AM applications portfolio within your enterprise. Don’t treat AM as a fad; it will change manufacturing in unprecedented ways.

What application areas do you see opening up?

Over the next three to five years, we expect growth and scale in applications that are gaining significant traction today – long tail spare parts, tooling, bridge production, product personalization, and mass customization.

What are the next products that will be industrialized with 3D printing?

Automotive and large manufacturing companies are leading the industrialization of AM, due to the significant cost savings associated with digitizing their inventory. Consumer products and med tech companies benefit from the high degree of cost-effective personalization that AM offers. The range of products that will be additively manufactured will depend on the rate of development of specialized materials, adoption of the digital thread, integration of digital security to protect IP, certification of AM products by regulatory agencies, and perhaps most importantly, the willingness of innovative executives who choose to be bullish on digitizing their businesses.

What are some of the technologies that you’re most interested in?

The ability to 3D print has been around for a long time. While recent developments in AM are certainly encouraging and exciting, the development of complementary technologies that accelerate and expand the value of AM are very interesting. These include IoT, data analytics, and AR/VR. Together with AM, these technologies unlock the true potential of Industry 4.0.

What are some key developments in 3D printing materials?

Materials are definitely on the critical path for large-scale adoption of additive manufacturing. Getting AM products to be the same or better than those produced by legacy manufacturing processes often comes down to material science and engineering. Given the unique requirements for each application, we are seeing material producers develop new strategies and even new business ventures to not just develop specialty materials, but also to provide supplemental services that accelerate the adoption of their materials.

What are the key stumbling blocks in 3D printing implementations?

There are two primary stumbling blocks – the first is companies that don’t believe that AM is finally here, not just hype. Current manufacturing processes have been around for a lot longer than AM and have reached a high degree of efficiency and optimization. AM has been touted as disrupting those legacy models for almost three decades, but has fallen short until very recently. There is an entrenched mindset that will require a cultural shift to facilitate adoption. The second stumbling block is the lack of a holistic approach to AM. There is a tendency by executives and engineers to focus on either cost or quality or some other standalone benefit. That results in a narrow adoption strategy, which often does not yield sufficient value to justify additional investment.

A lot of people can never tell me how much a 3D printed part costs. How much would a 3D Printed pen cost? How many could I make a day?

Cost and volume questions are valid, but the answers vary greatly by technology, material, and process. And in our opinion, they do not provide sufficient information when evaluating 3D printing. Along with the cost elements (once to determine how you intend to print a part), other important questions should be considered. For example, could a 3D printed pen function BETTER than a traditional pen? Could it be lighter weight? Could it be personalized to the user? Could you sell more of a 3D printed pen relative to a regular pen because of its added value? Would the lifecycle cost – not just a production cost – of the pen be lower?

What products would make sense for 3D printing, which would not?

Despite the advancements in recent years, some limitations remain. For example, products or parts that exceed the optimal build size of current machines can’t be printed. Products in sectors with heavy regulatory oversight and lengthy certification processes make the scaled adoption of 3D printing a cumbersome exercise. Products that cannot be accommodated by today’s material set require additional design cycles to determine feasibility. Like with any disruptive technology, the number of products that can be “onboarded” to AM will increase exponentially as demand increases.

Tsinghua University Investigates if Blends of PLA and PBS are Suitable for FDM 3D Printing

A trio of researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing recently published a paper, titled “Preparation and Characterization of Poly(butylene succinate)/Polylactide Blends for Fused Deposition Modeling 3D Printing,” about preparing material blends of PLA and PBS with various compositions, then validating if they are suitable for use as filaments for FDM 3D printing.

The abstract reads, “To obtain a new type of biodegradable material with high toughness and strength used for fused deposition modeling (FDM) printing, a series of poly(butylene succinate) (PBS)-based polymer materials was prepared via blending with polylactide (PLA). The rheological, thermal, and mechanical properties as well as FDM printing performances of the blends, such as distortion, cross section, and the interlayer bond strength, were characterized. The results show that with increasing PLA content, the blends possess higher melt viscosity, larger tensile strength, and modulus, which are more suitable for FDM printing. Especially, when the content of PLA is more than 40%, distortion due to residual stress caused by volume shrinkage disappears during the printing process and thus products with good dimensional accuracy and pearl-like gloss are obtained. The results demonstrate that the blend compositions with moderate viscosity, low degree of crystallinity, and high modulus are more suitable for FDM printing. Compared with the low elongation upon breaking of commercially FDM-printed material, the PBS/PLA blend materials exhibit a typical ductile behavior with elongation of 90−300%. Therefore, besides biodegradability, the PBS/PLA blends present excellent mechanical properties and suitability as materials for FDM printing. In addition, our study is expected to provide methods for valuating the suitability of whether a thermoplastic polymer material is suitable for FDM printing or not.”

Appearance of the PBS/PLA blend bars prepared by FDM 3D printing.

When it comes to prototyping, FDM is one of the most widely adopted technologies, and plenty of materials research has been conducted for the technology. Researchers have been working hard to develop new polymer materials for FDM 3D printing with both high dimensional accuracy and good mechanical properties. PLA, which theoretically can be degraded into just carbon dioxide and water under natural conditions, is often used, but it’s unfortunately a brittle material, which limits its applications.

PBS, with great thermal stability, has a decently low melting point and excellent ductility, which would make it good for FDM 3D printing. But, there haven’t been a lot of studies published on the use of the material as a 3D printing filament.

“One reason is that its low melt strength makes it difficult to continually form monofilament when extruded, which makes printing fail halfway,” the researchers explained. “Moreover, the distortion caused by the relatively large volume shrinkage during cooling probably happens after crystallization, thus resulting in defective products. Therefore, modification of PBS is quite necessary to solve the drawbacks mentioned above and make the material suitable for FDM printing.”

By blending materials, the advantages of these two components can be combined – that’s why this modification method is used so often for polymer materials. There is little research about the use of PBS blends in FDM 3D printing, so the Tsinghua research team stepped up.

“The rheological, thermal, and mechanical properties of the blends were investigated, and different specimens were printed with these filaments to evaluate their suitability for FDM system,” the researchers wrote. “Interlayer bond strength in the printed products was also measured. Furthermore, we expect to find a relationship between the properties of materials and the performance of FDM printing so as to give a reference for judging whether a thermoplastic polymer material, not limited to polymer blends, is suitable for FDM printing or not.”

Vertically printed PBS40/PLA60 samples for testing the interlayer bond strength.

The team first dried PBS and PLA pellets at 65°C for 12 hours in a vacuum oven before processing them and extruding the blended pellets into filaments for FDM 3D printing. In addition to a few other shapes, like a rabbit, a cuboid model was printed to show distortion, which can be an obstacle to overcome in FDM.

The shear viscosity of the polymer blend melt was measured, along with the thermal properties, such as glass transition temperatures. The researchers also injection-molded the polymer blend pellets to make dumbbell-shaped and cuboid bars for tensile and impact tests, in addition to performing a thermal analysis on these bars to “investigate the effect of FDM printing process on the crystallization behavior of the PBS/PLA blends.”

“All blends exhibit excellent processing properties and can be extruded as monofilaments with 1.75 mm diameter via a single-screw extruder. With increasing PBS content, the elongation at break and impact strength of the blends arise,” the researchers explained. “However, distortion of the printed bars increases due to larger volume shrinkage resulting from the higher degree of crystallinity in the blends. In addition, the interlayer bond strength improves due to the decreased melt viscosity. When PLA content in the blends is not less than 40 wt %, FDM printing can proceed smoothly with neither observable distortion nor detachment from the platform at room temperature.”

The paper also states that PBS60/PLA40 and PBS40/PLA60, in terms of interlayer bond strength, material toughness, and distortion, are the “optimal blend compositions” for use in FDM 3D printing.

SEM images of cross sections of the FDM-printed bars.

“Therefore, with pearl-like gloss and good mechanical properties as well as dimensional accuracy, the bio-based PBS/PLA blends are new promising materials for producing FDM filaments for applications in many fields, especially for architectural design,” the researchers concluded. “Furthermore, our study is expected to provide methods for evaluating whether a thermoplastic polymer material is suitable for FDM printing or not.”

Co-authors of the paper are Qing Ou-Yang, Baohua Guo, and Jun Xu.

Discuss this research and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts below.

rCrumbl, the Ultimate Raspberry Pi Smartphone #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Great project from Steward’s Notes via Hackaday:

About a year ago I set out to create a functional smartphone from a Raspberry Pi. Its been a fun adventure. I began this project with only a moderate amount of experience in working with electronics, and I’ve come a long way since that time. I am by no means the first person to create a raspberry pi phone there are one or two people who I am certain have come before me. In order to claim some sort of title for the work that I would be doing, I decided that I would attempt to create the smallest form factor phone possible given my knowledge and experience. This alone became quite the challege, but in the process I learned a great deal about product design, CAD, and 3D printing.

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