Design and Development of syringe based Extruder for an FDM Printer

Abstract

Additive manufacturing technology as evolved with wide range applications in several fields. Syringe based extrusion is technique of the additive manufacturing technology in which is mainly used for bioprinting, paste extrusions e.t.c. A syringe is used for the extrusion of material or printable inks; the material to be printed is placed in the syringe. The syringe plunger helps the material to extrude out of the syringe with certain diameter. Syringe plunger is moved forward through a gear set up to the stepper motor. Designing and development of the syringe extruder components is done in affordable ways and tested with several printable parameters. The application of these techniques is mainly in medical field (bioprinting) for fabrication of bone tissues, cell tissues. A good quality print is obtained using the parameters (print speed, travel speed, flow rate) and also calculated value of extrusion multiplier. The print quality can further improve using the bionks with good viscosity and some design changes of the setup and also by accurate leveling of print bed and better calibration of the printer after installing the syringe setup on the normal printer setup.