Designing of an original extruding system for 3D printing of parts made of plastic material in powder-state form

Abstract

Since their advent, various 3D printing technologies have been developed, out of which the Fused Filament Fabrication, FFF has completely revolutionized the industry in the last years. Classical FFF printers are using a thermoplastic filament, which is heated to its melting point and then extruded layer by layer to materialize a three dimensional part. One of the most important subassemblies of the 3D printer which is the most representative is the extrusion sub-assembly system and the thermal demands to which is subjected. In this article, one original constructive variant of the extruding sub-assembly system has been conceived and thermal analyses of the variant was performed by using the finite element method so as to be used not only for printing parts made of plastic materials in filament form, but also plastic materials in the powder state form at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.