Sugar Printing Recipies

[ezrec]

I’m working on a sugar powder printer, and saw that you were interested in prototyping that with the Focus printer.

I’m still far away form completion of my powder bed system, but I’ve done some preliminary materials analysis and prototyping while waiting for parts to arrive, and have recorded my results here: BrundleFab: Print Media Research

Long story short, I have had some had good success with the following procedure:

Powdered Sugar/Meringue Powder + Alcohol/Water

Powder base is granulated sugar and meringue powder (whipped and dried egg writes)
Adhesive is alcohol and water

Procedure
 * Lay down 10mm of powder
 * Sift a layer of 2mm of powder, and pack down to 1mm.
 * Apply 1mm droplets of (colored) adhesive to the powder via a needle bottle (unknown tip size)
 * Go to 2. until part build volume is complete
 * Lay down 10mm of granulated sugar
 * Heat at 120C (250F) in oven for 1 hour
 * Let cool
 * Remove from build container, and remove excess sugar

Results
  - Sugar/Meringue powder is % by mass
  - Alcohol/Water is % by volume

Sugar	Meringue Water	Alcohol	Results
90%	10%	 50%	50%	Small droplet size (1mm), no capillary creep from the droplets; resulting object could be rinsed of excess powder

More work needs to be done (ie, I think I can decrease the meringue powder down to <5% by mass and still have a good product), but the meringue powder seems to be a useful concept.

[dragonator]

Hello Ezrec, welcome to the forum

This is the first time I heared of meringue for 3DP printing (sugar, maltodextrin and PVA are all I have seen thus far) and the idea seems interesting. The link you provided doesn’t go anywhere to me, so I can’t see your results, but using egg powder seems on first glance that it has potential.

The procedure you described is clear and should be reproducable on a Plan B. I am really tempted to give it a try when I resume printing experiments. I will show results if I have tried it.

[ezrec]

Hmm. I seem to have misused the link button in the forum post… No preview either…

http://www.evillabs.net/wiki/index.php/Project_BrundleFab

.. Or Google for “BrundleFab”.

Also: I accidentally discovered (while trying to dispose of the experiment in the sink) that the meringue powder part will survive a light rinse after the baking step.

Could be useful for removing excess powder.

And on the baking step – times and temperatures will need to be played with, but I would try to stay between 85 C and 120 C.

One thing I want to play with is incremental baking by using a laser printer fuser roller before the powder scraper.

[Author]

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