Development of a Parafin Wax deposition Unit for Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM)

摘要

During the last decade Additive Manufacturing (AM) witnessed a big development in terms of technologies, processes and possibilities. However of materials and their use still represents a big challenge. In fact availability of materials is rather limited if compared to conventional manufacturing. This project illustrates the redesign of an extrusion unit for the deposition of paraffin wax in Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) instead of the conventional polymeric materials. Among the benefits and brought by the use of paraffin wax in such system are: the possibility to make highly complex and precise parts to subsequently use in a Lost Wax Casting process, multi-material Additive Manufacturing and the use of wax as support material during the production of complicated parts. Moreover it is believed that including waxes among the materials usable in FDM would promote new ways of using and exploring the technology and opening to new challenges. The design presented in this paper represents a step towards the development of a multi material deposition unit, able to selectively depose specific materials on demand in the same product, according to needs. In order to achieve that, waxes and respectivedesigns are tested iteratively by alternating different methods in order to find the best configuration. The use of an open source platform, namely a Reprap Prusa Mendel allows to perform quick changes to the system without significant modifications to the major frame of the machine. During the design of the new extruder principles of modularity and reconfigurability are also taken into account in order to ease up a subsequent integration with a more complex system.