User-Centered Property Adjustment with Programmable Filament

Abstract

In today's society, where "one size fits all"does not work anymore, people's requirements for material living became more personalized. Despite the fact that there exist customized services for a variety of commodities, these services are generally expensive and such customization for physical artifacts is not accessible by average users. In this work, we follow the promise of Programmable Filament [21], a novel technique to enable end-users with low-cost Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printers to equip multi-material printing capabilities at low investment. We discovered that this technique can be applied to mix mechanical properties of two different materials (e.g., tensility) that may affect user's comfort in 3D printed objects (e.g., personal optimal softness in sports gear) to meet individual needs. We briefly introduce the process to 3D print programmable filaments using consumer-grade 3D printers in various composition ratios and fabricate 3D printed objects using an FDM printer blending multi-materials in the hot end, present a tensile testing experiment on sample objects made of such filaments to show its feasibility in producing new properties, and demonstrate two real-world applications that can be benefited from Programmable Filament utilization. We conclude with the remaining limitations and discussions about two potential structural improvements to improve printability of this filament for deployment.