Automatic Material Parameter Identification: An innovative approach enables the automatic identification of printing parameters for unknown materials, facilitating the use of sustainable materials in 3D printing.
Research Collaboration: Collaboration between MIT, NIST, and Demokritos has led to groundbreaking progress in adapting 3D printer parameters, advancing sustainability in additive manufacturing.
Innovative Research: Automatic Adjustment of 3D Printer Parameters for Sustainable Materials.
In the world of 3D printing, significant progress is on the horizon to enable more sustainable production methods. While 3D printing technologies are becoming increasingly popular, they face a challenge: Many of the plastic materials used for printing are difficult to recycle. Though new sustainable materials are emerging, using them proves challenging as settings need manual adjustments for each material.
Researchers addressed this issue by developing a 3D printer capable of automatically identifying the parameters of an unknown material. A collaborative team from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Center for Scientific Research in Greece (Demokritos) modified the extruder, the "heart" of a 3D printer, to measure the forces and flow of a material.
These data are used to automatically generate printing parameters that can be entered into standard 3D printing software and used to print with a material never before seen.
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