Research On The Development Of High Viscosity Material 3D Printer And Its Application In Food And Medicine Printing

As a new manufacturing method, Three Dimentional Printing technology develops raipidly in resent years, it has been extensively used in fields as aviation, molding, medication, and education.3D printing technology fabricates parts by increasing material or layered printing, which is faster and more complex compared to traditional manufacturing methods. This article conducted a deep research on Fused Deposition Modelling process, designed a high viscosity material 3D printer and carried out application research in food and medicine printing.This article compared the characteristics and application of air pressure extruder, screw extruder and piston extruder based on the analysis of non-newtonian fluid properties of high viscosity material. Calculated the extrusion flow of each pattern, thus the piston extruder was chosen. Meanwhile analyzed the material’s depositional model and established four common filament width model, and calculated the deposited filament width.This article developed a general 3D printer that uses Z-axis to drive the working platform and ball screw with a stepper motor to drive the X-Y axes, designed a chocolate print nozzle with heat function and a twin nozzle for double-layer tablet printing, designed the cooling platform and cooling fan based on the principle of semiconductor refrigeration.This article conducted application research on food and medicine printing based on the extrusion theory and original designed 3D printer. In food printing, chocolate was selected as the material. This article researched the influence of nozzle and platform motion parameters to chocolate molding, draw the printable range and printed several 3D models based on the research result.In medicine printing, this article printed a double-layer tablet that consist of a quick release layer and a slow release layer. Content determination test and external release experiment in simulated gastric and intestinal fluid find out that the main content of the 3D printed tablet met the design objective. The external release experiment showed that 3D printed tablets has significant impact of releasing in earlier stage and stable releasing in later stage. Therefor 3D printed tablets achieved the Design Objective.