There was a thing called shape, memory material which, after being made even if you deform it after warming up, it will come back to its original state to make original state. You need to heat it up to a certain temperature of 3-D printing would be perfect so you can print it at a very high temperature then if it deforms, you just heat it up and will reform together. Here is a video of white shape memory material can do https://m.youtube.com/shorts/RAEMm63guVY.
So what I’m proposing is bamboo labs will make a material with these properties. I don’t care what type of material is. I don’t even care the price. I just really want this. Tell me what you think. And if you have connections with bamboo labs, please make sure they find out about this. Maybe they can save me as a person that helped think of the idea. [poll type=multiple results=always min=1 max=2 public=true chartType=bar]
Shape memory is a very unique property of one type of metal.
There simply is no thermoplastic polymer with the same property. So it will be impossible for BambuLab to create a filament with shape memory properties for their 3d printers.
Actually, there are shape memory polymers. But I have no idea if they’d be suitable for FDM or if they’d be able to be tuned solely by printing (shape memory metals like NiTinol require very specific conditions) and whether or not they can be activated in useful temp ranges.
Certainly worth an interesting lit review.
Would be great to reduce waste.
If you don’t need your printed part anymore, you simply turn it back into a spool of filament
But being serious, the printability if probably the biggest problem.
What I also understand is that the polymer can only restore to its original shape by activating it, but won’t return to the deformed shape when for instance being cooled, like the metal springs in the movie.
we never use impossible It is not impossible Polly maker believe that’s how you call. It makes a tungsten filament. It is like 25% pet G and 75% tungsten now bamboo labs can do the same thing 25% TPU 75% shape memory material also in the video above that I linked, it demonstrates using shape memory materials, such as metal and plastic
Oh, that is news to me. Thank you for correcting me. I looked around and besides PTFE, actually PLA often is mentioned to have shape memory properties. Probably it is not usable in the way the alloys in the video are. Still I’m curious now. What I read, polymers can only return to a previous shape once and then they have to be reprogrammed.
Unfortunately, only with metals. Tried to exploit Nitinols superelasticity rather than the memory effect in the past. Got a lot of cursing from the workshop as it is a nightmare to machine .
From the little googling I have done today, it looks like most semi-crystalline polymers are candidates. In particular PET, PMMA and PEEK pop up a few times. But since a good level of crystallinity is required, it neccessitates post-printing annealing. And to “train”, a pressure needs to be applied simultaneously. So anything but trivial, but maybe there’s something in the science journals. I would not be surprised if somebody had looked into that in the past.
For mixtures, things could indeed be quite interesting too. Just not sure how small NiTi fibres can be (while still being safe) or how they would be trained. Could be a fun material though. And I expect it would not need a high filler content if dispersed well. They could be good for repeated cycles although the material stiffness mismatch and resulting fatigue would put a limit. Just be prepared for extreme prices. I’d expect this kind of material to be priced (well) above PEEK and PEKK filament…
Yes i guess it would be pretty pricey but the applications are worth it. What I’ve seen with shape memory that is metal how you train the material is that you heat it to a high temperature then it can go back to that shape with the appropriate amount of heat and if you reheat it to that high temperature you can make it so it will be retrained.
Well, worth is in the eye of the beholder. I remember when my dad brought some shape memory alloy home, the paper clip and a small spoon (he had to return the spoon the next working day ). Well over 35 years ago. But this stuff is so expensive that applications are either tiny and heavily standardized (like overheating safety switches) or in extremely specialized applications (while still trying to minimize material use for example as solar sail release mechanisms on satellites*).
Besides the material cost, an important part of the cost is in “training” the memory effect as heat alone is insufficient. Some force needs to be applied as well and both heat and and force maintained during crystallization. Probably much easier with polymers than with metal, but quite an art nonetheless.
At a guess, a thorough lit review leading to a range of possible process chains including FDM would probably be enough for a good BSc, with experimentation a very good MSc and a thorough formulation and validation of major process drivers and variables for a single material group could very well earn a PhD.
Best wishes,
Yours,
Eno
PS: *IIRC, explosive bolts shrugged off that emerging competition due to weight, cost, robustness and reliability. In high value applications, “right first time” is quite important.
yes, she is a complex task. I feel there could be some possible ways to make it less complex one thing you could probably think about is such in vacuum moulding if that is how you call it is when you put an object in a machine that will fold all around the object to make a mold I wonder if you could put the material in it for the pressure now I’m not sure if there would be any complex things making not work, but that’s just an idea of having in my head, but this material would be very cool to branch off of and I see where it could be a really cool thing to do for a school project. Definitely is a bit more complex though because you’d have to fall around if plastics different heating‘s different amounts to be able to use in FDM printing I know there is a new type of 3-D printing that uses metal beads or sand or something like that wonder if you could use the material like that in there anyways something could definitely branch off of or have to think of it more deeply, but I might try making something like this and put it in like an ender but as you said it’s very complex and there’ll be a lot of research involved, but maybe it’s a summer project
in this video, it seems that the pressure needed is just to keep it in the right shape now this is using metal and not plastic that you’d have to use for FDM now as I said you could use a metal 3-D printer they are new but there’s definitely possibilities, but it seems the pressures is to keep it in the right shape while it’s red hot https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i903knvi3qM&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5tD
A friend of mine used that experiment to “sell” his NiTinol PhD work. Instead of a weight, he had customers lift a small model airplane
At that time, I first looked into Rapid Prototyping including metal powder bed processes (both sintering and melting) and wire deposition. Even today, they have important limits (in particular porosity, brittleness and residual stresses) requiring quite elaborate post-processing so I doubt it’ll be a good topic for a school topic.
I do however see quite a bit of interesting work with either shape memory polymers (maybe since I do not know a lot about them ) or by using thin, trained and chopped NiTinol wire in a polymer.
Or…
Just found TPU SME on offer from Filament2Print at €170 for 300g…
and …
CCTREE’s 4D filament is available on amazon in the US. Only $23 per kg. Available in 250 and 1000g rolls… Different colors even…
But users report it as being tricky to print.
Sounds perfect for a school project. Just difficult enough to be challenging but not so difficult as to lead to life choices.
Just guessing that it’ll print a bit like soft TPU (probably needs drying, feeding from the top, slow speeds, etc).
I did even know they sold 3-D printing material that was shape memory The whole purpose of this thread was to kinda make awareness of it, but looks like some companies already made it still would be nice to have Bambulabs make it. Anyways, school is out for the summer so any projects I would do would be in a while, but still, I could see some cool things of kind of making a pipe cleaner with it. You could put the metal inside with TPu on the outside. But you’d have to probably use a mould for that it’ll be kind of cool to make like a tower and then you smash it and then it would like rebuild itself
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). Well over 35 years ago. But this stuff is so expensive that applications are either tiny and heavily standardized (like overheating safety switches) or in extremely specialized applications (while still trying to minimize material use for example as solar sail release mechanisms on satellites*).
