Plastic recycling

Description

Build an extruder to recycle and create new filament cheaply for Fixme's Ultimaker and other people's printers. An extruder is constructed from essentially two parts: a feeding mechanism, and a heater - chopped plastic is fed from a container into the feeding mechanism, which then pushes the plastic slowly through the heater to create the filament.

Goal

• Recycle failed/old prints and extruded plastic

• Recycle other plastics, such as PET bottles (caps), etc
• Experiment with new colors and materials

Obstacles

• Get a filament of repeatable thickness

• More complex = more difficult

• Ventilation preferable for ABS

Parts needed

• Tube (or a rubber stator if we choose the PCP option)
• Screw to move the material trough, like an Archimedes screw (where can we find that ?) but preferably a Progressive cavity pump to have a constant flow, low shearing and perfect for viscous material transport).
• Pretty High torque motor
• Heating element (nichrome wires ?)
• Extrusion nozzle
• Cooling system (air/water/oil ?)

Resources

Extruders

• Basic extruder

• More advanced extruder

I'm guessing we should build something in between - not too simple but not too expensive either.

Misc

• Color filament
• Filament recycling detailed research paper (noskill)
• Broyeuse extrudeuse domestique (noskill)

Schedule

Why do we even have this section?

Participants

• noskill
• sasha