Facile Adaptation of a Fused Deposition Modeling 3D Printer to Motionless Printing Through Programmable Electric Relay: Discretized Modeling and Experiments

In this study, a fused deposition modeling 3D printer is modified into a motionless printer, which has the potential to print patterns in a noiseless manner possibly with improved resolution and in less delay time by eliminating the movement of nozzle or collector. In this motionless 3D printer, both nozzle and collector are fixed, whereas the extruded polymer melt is driven by high-voltage switching points on the collector. By this approach, simple 3D patterns such as multilayer circles, squares, and walls have been printed using two polymer melts with different rheological properties, high-temperature polylactic acid and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. Furthermore, a discretized, nonisothermal bead and spring model is developed to probe printing patterns. The effect of parameters, such as number of conducting points, switching time, voltage and material properties on the accuracy of the printed simple 3D patterns, are thoroughly studied, and we demonstrated that various fiber collection patterns obtained from the experiments are favorably compared with the simulation results.