Manufacturing is responsible for a large percentage of carbon emissions world-wide, and in an effort to become a green campus, Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) has encouraged students and staff to find different and more sustainable ways of doing things. 3D printing has become a very important part of manufacturing and making a large amount of small, durable parts and products. However, 3D printer filament is quite expensive, and when buying large amounts, costs can add up quickly. EMU students Adam Stoltzfus and Micaiah Landis are working to try and make a cheaper, more sustainable method of 3D printing large amounts of parts.
The way 3D printers work is fairly simple. Normally, a roll of plastic filament is fed into a moveable heating element that can position itself based on coordinates given to the printer, usually by a computer. It then heats the plastic just enough to melt the filament, while laying it in a way specified by the instructions given to the printer. It can then print most any object or shape out of that plastic, as long as it fits within the bounds of the printer. Stoltzfus and Landis have been working on making their own filament out of old plastic bottles, providing a much cheaper and more sustainable alternative to buying large amounts of filament on Amazon or another online distributor.
“We’ve been doing a lot of 3D printing recently for the EV car project,” says Landis. “And we needed a lot of filament. So we’ve been thinking about ways to get cheaper filament. We found that recycled bottles can be unwound into strips and repurposed as filament, which allows us to basically 3D print for free.”
Stoltzfus elaborated on their needs, saying that, “we have to make little frames to hold batteries for the EV car project. However, in order to arrange enough batteries to get it running, we need somewhere in the range of 6,000 to 10,000 cases, which would cost a very large amount for all the filament we’d need to buy.”
Landis also spoke in depth about how their filament-maker works. “We 3D-printed pretty much all the parts for the machine, everything except for the board and the electronics.”
Stoltzfus mentioned that, “we had to modify the original design of this machine in order to accommodate bigger rolls of filament.”
“The way it works is fairly simple,” says Landis. “We unroll the bottles into strips, then we feed it through a heating element that should fold it into a little tube, which we can then feed into the printer.”
However, this project has not been without its challenges. Stoltzfus said that, “the biggest problem that we’ve been having is that one full bottle doesn’t give us a full roll of filament. We can’t figure out how to merge the two strips of filament together well. If we can figure that out, then we should be able to just let it go and not worry about the printing. Physically it’s all there, we just have to do a little tweaking to make it work correctly.” They have had some successes. They did manage to print a small figurine of a boat while testing the filament’s effectiveness. Landis mentioned that it, “took a couple failed attempts, but we got it to print eventually.” When their filament-maker is fully up and running, they intend to continue working on the EV car project with the parts they print from their filament, and also other projects of theirs that may need filament. If you are interested in this project or want to learn more about it, you can get in contact with Landis and Stoltzfus at micaiah.landis@emu.edu and adam.stoltzfus@emu.edu.
