Control plastic pellet feeding double extruders for 3D printing symmetric bilateral

Abstract

Three Dimensional Printing (3DP) is one of the technologies that support industry 4.0. One of the common 3DP technology is FFF (fused filament Fabrication), the technology is also known as Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM). In this case, extrusion thermoplastic through a hot nozzle with certain melting temperature. The extrusion machine (extruder) will melt the plastic pellet and push the pellet through a heating zone that has a different temperature and pushed out by a screw to the nozzle to be printed into objects. This research aims, to make a control innovation for plastic pellet feeding double extruders. Those extruders for a bilateral 3DP symmetrically to print an object with a size of 2000x2000x2000mm using FDM method. The research simulation results showed that the extruder melts the plastic pellets with a temperature of melting is 200°C, temperature controlled by PID. In this research using 4mm plastic pellets diameter polyethylene high density (HDPE). The double extruders is controlled by two stepper motors Y- and Y+ axis with speed 70mm/s, on 2mm nozzle diameter. The extruder can be produce 110mm melted plastic filaments in 250 steps.