Speaker
Description
It is evident that 3D printing has advanced rapidly up to nowadays, being actually a technology which has revolutionized the industrial sector (called industrial revolution 4.0). The advances not only concerning to the engineering level, but also involucres many others fields such, for example, health, jewelry or food.
The employed materials in this type of manufacturing include a great variety of both different nature (polymers, ceramics and metals) and origin (natural, synthetic or mixtures). Most of the raw materials are polymers, as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), polylactic acid (PLA), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) or polycarbonate (PC). In general, these materials are not biodegradable or they degrade slowly as petroleum derivatives. Attending to the increase of 3D printing, either as a rapid prototyping technique or in other areas as academic, industrial or even at the domestic level, it is necessary to study the possibilities of reusing these raw materials when they become waste.
In this study, we have selected PLA polymer, a thermoplastic biopolymer whose precursor molecule is the lactic acid, which can obtained from vegetable resources. Due to its biodegradability and biocompatibility with other polymers, it has numerous applications and is widely used. Therefore, this polymer is one of the most often used in 3D printing, hence the interest in its reusing. This work begins with the collection and selection of the generated PLA wastes. Then, residual pieces were crushed, cut and size reduced for employment as as raw material, according to requirements of the filament extruder. During this step, the size of the manufactured pellets and the control of variables of the extruder are critical. After manufacturing filament, with 100% of recycled PLA, specimens were fabricated with a 3D printer for their mechanical characterization, with the subsequent comparison with printed samples from commercial filament.
| Speaker Country | Spain |
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