Distributed Manufacturing of Flexible Products: Technical Feasibility and Economic Viability

Abstract

Abstract:Distributed manufacturing even at the household level is now well established with the combined use of open source designs and self-replicating rapid prototyper (RepRap) 3-D printers. Previous work has shown substantial economic consumer benefits for producing their own polymer products. Now flexible filaments are available at roughly 3-times the cost of more conventional 3-D printing materials. To provide some insight into the potential for flexible filament to be both technically feasible and economically viable for distributed digital manufacturing at the consumer level this study investigates 20 common flexible household products. The 3-D printed products were quantified by print time, electrical energy use and filament consumption by mass to determine the cost to fabricate with a commercial RepRap 3-D printer. Printed parts were inspected and when necessary tested for their targeted application to ensure technical feasibility. Then, the experimentally measured cost to DIY manufacturers was compared to low and high market prices for comparable commercially available products. In addition, the mark-up and potential for long-term price declines was estimated for flexible filaments by converting thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) pellets into filament and reground TPE from a local recycling center into filament using an open source recyclebot. This study found that commercial flexible filament is economically as well as technically feasible for providing a means of distributed home-scale manufacturing of flexible products. The results found a 75% savings when compared to the least expensive commercially equivalent products and 92% when compared to high market priced products. Roughly, 160 flexible objects must be substituted to recover the capital costs to print flexible materials. However, as previous work has shown the Lulzbot Mini 3-D printer used in this study would provide more than a 100% ROI printing one object a week from hard thermoplastics, the upgrade needed to provide flexible filament capabilities can be accomplished with 37 average substitution flexible prints. This, again easily provides a triple digit return on investment printing one product a week. Although these savings, which are created by printing objects at home are substantial, the results also have shown the savings could be further increased to 93% when the use of a pellet extruder and TPE pellets, and 99% if recycled TPE filament made with a recyclebot is used. The capital costs of a recyclebot can be recovered in the manufacturing of about 9 kg of TPE filament, which can be accomplished in less than a week, enabling improved environmental impact as well as a strong financial return for heavy 3-D printer users.

Sponsored Libre Research Agreements to Create Free and Open Source Software and Hardware

“…As the open source development of digital fabrication tools such as 3-D printers, mills and laser cutters [31][32][33][34] are coupled with software that enables convenient customization [63] and free public resources for open source design exchange [64,65], peer production can emerge [66]. These practices bring high value products to consumers for lower costs than what is available on the market for a wide range of consumer products [67][68][69] ranging from toys [70] and educational aids [71][72][73][74][75] to upper end of scientific equipment [76][77][78]. There is already considerable evidence that the downloaded substitution value [79] of such designs (which provide savings from 90-99% [41,42,78,79]) can bring significant return on investments (ROIs) [80] to research funders.…”

Self-sufficiency of 3-D printers: utilizing stand-alone solar photovoltaic power systems

“…Preliminary work has already begun to determine the number of cycles a polymer can withstand the print, recycle, filament extrude loop (Sanchez et al 2015(Sanchez et al , 2017. Advanced flexible materials (Woern and Pearce 2017) as well as waste composites ) have also been recycled successfully following this approach, and an untethered solar-powered recyclebots have been developed (Zhong et al 2017). As expanded resin identification codes are adopted, this activity can expand (Hunt et al 2015).…”

Open Source Waste Plastic Granulator

“…The open-source release of the self-replicating rapid prototyper (RepRap) 3D printer [1][2][3] greatly expanded access to additive manufacturing (AM) because of several orders of magnitude reduction in costs [4]. As open-source RepRap 3D printers spawned hundreds of clones, fused filament fabrication (FFF) enabled a shift in the trend from centralized to consumer (or prosumer) distributed manufacturing [4][5][6][7][8]. Consumers now use RepRaps or pre-built desktop 3D printers to manufacture all manner of products from toys to household items less expensively than purchasing them from conventional brick and mortar or online retailers [9][10][11].…”