26 Reply by Lee

  • Lee
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  • Registered: 2013-03-14
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Re: Glass + filament adventure

If you decide to go down the chemical route, you may gain some additional insight by reading the results of RepRapPro's experiments in this vein.

Google reprappro conducting plastic experiments. Go to the github link they provide and examine the pdf file where they describe the methods and uniformity they achieve. It may save you some time.

27 Reply by ronwoodwardpe

  • ronwoodwardpe
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  • Registered: 2013-06-21
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Re: Glass + filament adventure

The glass beads would polish the inside of the extruder and mix in some of the insides of the pipe, auger and nozzle IE iron, carbon, copper, zinc and any trace elements. Once the insides are polished the amount that gets worn off and mixed into the filament will go down however never to zero. As for not being sterile. 180c extrusion temp in both the filament extruder and the 3D printer should kill just about anything even though its only for a few seconds. The autoclave 30 minute hold time is to make sure bulky equipment wrapped in sterile bundles has time to thoroughly heat up to 130C. A production version would probably need to be made from Bio-compatible materials like titanium. Not a cheap date.

28 Reply by supraflyer

  • supraflyer
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Re: Glass + filament adventure

I just finished a trial run of some reinforced ABS. (nylon) The size of the filament change to .080 from .070 after 6 hours of running. I assume the change was gradual but the brass nozzle wore out. The filament had a hard coating with occasional clumps around the circumference.