Extrusion-Based Multiple Material Mixer Design in Food Printing

Food products can be designed and fabricated to meet individual needs through controlling the amount of printing material and nutrition content. Applying multiplematerial is quite common in food design. Food printing technology with both single and multiple extrusion-based printhead are utilized to deliver such customized food products. The objectives of this study are to analyze the printing platforms and materials, and printhead design, such as single printhead for multiple material extrusion, and multi-material mixing printhead for dynamic mixing. The extrusion and mixing mechanisms, and design consideration are reported. Both single extrusion printhead and dual extrusion-based mixing printhead designs are discussed. An improvement design version is proposed.