Topic: [PET]- Tglase Regrind
Extruder type: Standard Filastruder with 1.75mm melt filter, full barrel insulation, hopper shaker, and vertical setup with winder.
Picture of my set up:
On the winder laser sensor, I added straws where the PTFE goes to help guide the filament better.
You can find more pictures on my imgur here: http://ggalisky.imgur.com/all/
Printer type: SD2, E3D v6, Bulldog XL, Glass bed, and Lawsy's Carriages.
Extrusion
Extrusion temperature: 205 °C
Extrusion rate: 15 inches per minute.
Average diameter of filament: 1.72mm
Tolerances: + or – 0.05mm
Granulation
One hurdle a user faces when recycling plastics, is granulation (breaking apart of a plastic chunk into smaller chunks) and pelitizng (chopping up of filament). I use an industrial granulator to grind up my prints, and the last few posts on this thread have more info on the granulator http://www.soliforum.com/post/67277/#p67277. As for pelitizing filament, I use this http://www.soliforum.com/topic/6997/hig … elletizer/. After granulation, I just load the material into the Filastruder.
Pre-Drying
Many different types of plastics need to be pre-dried in order to get good quality filament and prints. The plastics that encounter frequently that need pre-drying are PLA, Nylon, TPU, and PC (polycarbonate). There are several more plastics that need to be pre-dried, but for simplicity I only listed a few. I used a food dehydrator I bought off of Amazon to dry all of my pellets. http://www.amazon.com/Presto-06300-Dehy … dehydrator . The dehydrator comes with mesh plates, so you need to find a way to stop the pellets from falling through. I use this: http://www.amazon.com/National-Presto-D … ZNA913RBA. I usually let the pellets dry for about 10-17 hours. After drying I seal the pellets in a zip lock bag with a silica gel packet inside, and add a label so I know what plastic it is.
Comments
I got this from Tom over at Taulman 3D to experiment with. Thanks Tom! Link:http://taulman3d.com/ . I did run a batch of PET without pre-drying and got lots of bubbles, so this material should be dried prior to extrusion and printing. The optical properties of this material is about the same as acrylic, but PET is a lot stronger and more flexible.
Printing
Setting my glass bed to 104°C, the hot end to 230°C, the extrusion multiplier to 150% for the first layer, and using a coat of PVA glue worked moderately well against warping. This is a easy material to print. Layer bonding is better ABS, but still nowhere near nylon. The spiral vase setting in slic3r is quite slow, making the print time for the vase around 2 hours and 15 minutes. The robot took about 30 minutes.
Brittleness
1-10 scale, 1 is TPU and 10 is acrylic. 3
Layer bonding
1-10 scale, 1 is Nylon and 10 is acrylic. 4
Comparison to commercial PET filament: Pretty much the same, no real difference.
Pictures:
Questions? Comments? Feel free to send me a PM, or post a reply down below!
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