Granulate extruder for the Cr-10s

Abstract

he purpose of this thesis was to build and test a granular extruder for a Creality Cr-10s 3D printer. Most of the parts were manufactured at Arcada University of Applied Sciences and a few parts were purchased from outside. Plastic parts were made using Dassault Systemès Solidworks software and 3D printed, metal parts were made according to need. Using the volume flow rate analysis based on Crawford 2005 and several other sources, the volume flow rate was measured by the original filament extruder. The volume flow was measured several times at different screw speeds to find an optimal screw speed for the extruder in relation to the original extruder. The different screw speeds were achieved by g-code manipulation of the printer's own settings. The results were varied but indicated that the optimum rotation speed was around 1600 to 1900 steps per millimeter of plastic. Due to external reasons, final testing and optimization of the printer could not be performed. The conclusion is that with optimization of granule size, screw length, rotational speed, the extruder could potentially achieve the same reliability and quality as a traditional filament extruder.