experimentation
make it happen
composites
2016
for the first test with composites I wanted to make a clip stand for iphone/ipad. I was planning to use a carbon fibers that we had in the valldaura labs as a leftovers from the workshop with airbus. see the process and file preparation….time pressured me a bit and I had no opportunity to go up to Valldaura, so I had to skip this experimentation for now… anyway, you can still get the files and try to make it by yourself...
download files_clip stand
...so and I decided to mill a shell for my other project and I decided to test a shell… at the end I didnt get to the milling of the mold,used both vendors - textile and resin-epoxy...to be continued...
The mixture of materials should be done with a ratio of 2/1, with 2 times amount of Epoxy resin. Of course, it is very important to protect your skin, so use gloves, shades, any other kind of protection! After mixing the two products until homogeneous, the process of application should be done very quickly (before the mix heats up and dries) and spread equally on the pieces of textile fabric (3 layers of textile in my case). The next step is the vacuum bagging process, and it is very important to cover the mold and all the other layers with two sheets of intact film (make sure they are not perforated), one on the bottom and the other on top so as to protect the machine from the resin. A satisfying result should appear at approx. twelve hours later.
after designing my piece in Rhino I used RhinoCAM for code generation and up here you can see the processes (Horizontal roughing and finnishing).
milli on Shopbot
Epoxy and hardener.
and since I did this assignment back in 2016 and I lost all the files because I was working on the LAB computer and saved them only on the cloud, what is currently not working, unfortunatelly I saved only pictures from the process and final output.
robotics
2019
...so I decided to test capabilities of 3D printing with robotic arm. IaaC is well known for experimentations and research in that field. Robotics Taco abb gh Gh>//panel code copy to txt file and change the extension from r to prg Prg file export by usb transfer to robotcontroller first test was with the layer height of 2.8 mm than change 4.8
I am aware of the fact that my geometry is more complex, and therefore I had skype call with Manuel from Nagami design to get a feedback about various possibilities of using robotic printing technique of my geometry...
...in such a situations make it spiral continuous line that extruder on the robotic arm can follow the path easily...
using double-with layer instead of single assuring that the layers would get more support...
top of the geometry would need some extra support what I can get by creating contour lines taking as a base my geometry and from last contoure curves make an extrusions - that way I can create supports for the top overhanging part.
...and of course than contour everything before printing...this should be the workflow for robotic 3d printing...next step - move to the reality and prepare my model for printing with clay and ABB robot...
So it started. First we had to download a Taco plugin for grashopper to be able to generate a code for the robot. than I imported my geometry and set it as an input in the gh definition.
Preparation of the material - it needs to be mixed with a bit of water to get nice soft homogenious mass, than it needs to be filled into the extruder, be careful to avoid bubbles....otherwise it would create a small air explosions, bubbles and another not wanted effects.
The material was too dry, not enough of water, thats why it started to have a gaps... than as you can see, there was a bubble, so it created a small explosion...Even after the pressure adjustement (around 4 bar) it still needs to be tweaked manually even during the prints.
Printing a first test, than after finishing we cleaned up the extruder with releasing the pressure.
Second try. Final output went well.
Final output, fresh outta printer.
