Retrofit do sistema de alimentação de uma impressora 3D industrial para uso de filamentos de baixo custo

Abstract

Currently, the use of 3D printers with material extrusion technology has been widely used. Thanks to the expiration of the first patents of the company Stratasys, pioneer of the technology, several startups were able to make printers available at a reduced cost. Currently, the first machines with this technology are being discontinued, no longer having technical assistance and supply of inputs. The Additive Manufacturing and Tooling Group has a machine with this technology, that is, an industrial-sized 3D printer. The objective of this work was to carry out a retrofit in the feeding system of this 3D printer, in order to use a generic filament of reduced cost and develop a procedure for using this machine. For this, alternative programs and firmware were used, which perform the decoding of a chip, through an electronic device with a microcontroller (Arduino Nano), which records information on the new material on it. Also, a support was developed to fit the new filament spool inside the canister. It was necessary to develop a routine to erase a file in the operating system inside the hard drive, só that the modified chip was accepted by the machine. The development of this work resulted in the feasibility of using an industrial 3D printer with low-cost filaments, preventing the machine from being inactive. Reducing the cost of filament spools from approximately R$5,000.00 to the value of R$150.00 and the dimensions of the printed pieces had an average error of 0.11 mm for the Z axis and 0.14 mm for the axes X and Y. The results comparing the original filaments with the generic ones were satisfactory, being more cost-effective, with no pauses during printing, adhesion failures between layers of support filament layers and filament breakage within the tubing.