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This study was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/N024818/1). The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that affect or may be perceived to affect the work described in this article.
While the pandemic has restricted us from many of the activities we enjoy, family hobbies like DIY, baking and needlework have become more popular. Now there is a way to combine all these skills to create something completely new. However, you will need a 3D printer.
3D printers can quickly print plastic items of any shape. But there are many things they cannot do. You couldn’t 3D print pasta in the shape of your kid’s favorite cartoon character, or make pizza in the shape of your football team logo – until now. Our new research paper, published in Data in Brief, demonstrates an easy way to convert 3D printers to create objects from food or clay.
Over the past few years, 3D printing has moved out of the realm of science fiction, research labs, and technology companies and into the reach of enthusiasts. This is because printers have become cheaper and easier to use. Several competing brands are selling 3D printer build kits online for under £300 and plastic filament for under £20 a kilo.
While 3D printers sound like incredibly complex futuristic machines, it’s actually quite easy to understand how they work. The software used to control a 3D printer takes a 3D image and cuts it into many 2D images (flat). The printer “draws” these flat images one on top of the other using melted plastic as ink, as directed by the software. This stack of cereal becomes one.
To do this, an electric motor in the printer pushes the filament through a nozzle that heats up to over 200°C, melting the filament and pushing it out of the nozzle. This print head consists of nozzles and motors and can move in all three directions (length, width and height) because it is mounted on a separate motor, pulley, belt and screw for each direction. A 3D printer is nothing more than a print head, a movement mechanism, and a circuit board that controls both and communicates with the computer.
Imagine giving your friends a fancy cake or clay-printed coffee mug. To do this, you will need a 3D printer that uses a paste, gel, or paste material instead of a plastic filament. The gel or paste can be clay or edible items that you want to shape, such as jellies, doughs, soft cheeses, and jams.
Such a printer might have an empty “cartridge” to fill with your paper, and a printhead that “prints” from that cartridge. These printers have been around for many years. However, they usually exceed £1,000. But who needs them when you can make them at home and enjoy it?
Our new research shows how cheap plastic 3D printers can be modified to print gels and pastes. The idea is to replace the plastic-melting print head with a “syringe pump,” a device that holds a regular plastic syringe and squeezes out feed when needed. The plastic syringes themselves serve as cartridges for printers. The syringe pump is just a plastic frame that holds the syringe in place. The motor can be used to turn the screw pushing the nut down, which is used to push the plunger of the syringe and push the material out of the syringe needle.
But how to make a syringe pump? This is where it gets interesting. You can 3D print it in plastic before modifying the printer. Our science paper is free to read and contains all the 3D images needed to print all the parts and the exact steps to assemble them.
A syringe can be filled with almost any semi-solid and 3D printed in the same way that it can be printed on a plastic printer. For example, we 3D printed two different types of edible chewing gum, as shown in the image below:
After modifying the printer, you can also easily revert to the old printhead if you want to print with plastic again. have fun!