Two Team of NIT-K, India and New York University, USA in collaboration developed a lightweight filament for 3D printing

Two Team of NIT-K, India and New York University, USA in collaboration developed a lightweight filament for 3D printing

Researchers of NIT-K Surathkal and New York University, USA in collaboration developed a lightweight filament for 3D Printing which can be used in making lightweight components.

Team of Dr. Mrityunjay Doddamani from Mechanical Engineering department of National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal and team of Prof. Nikhil Gupta of New York University, Tandon School of Engineering(NYU), USA in collaboration developed a syntactic foam filament that can be used in commercial 3D printers for printing lightweight components. This filament is made from high density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic filled with ceramic hollow particles. HDPE is an industrial plastic and can be used in making industrial grade components. The filament was used in off the shelf commercial printers successfully to print specimens.

Dr. Doddamani told about the challenges they faced while developing this project. He said “optimization of parameters related to mixing of particles in polymer and extrusion of filament are crucial to ensure that particles do not break in the process”. Dr. Gupta also added, "success of the mixing process without breaking particles was an importantaspect in obtaining low density in the filament".

These low density filaments can help in making lightweight elements which provides the buoyant low density structures and can get easily used in the underwater vehicles.

What are Syntactic foam?

Syntactic foams are hollow particle filled lightweight polymer composites. These foams are extensively used for Naval applications like in marine underwater vehicles and submarines. Syntactic foams have enabled the deep dive capabilities of underwater vehicles such as Bluefin-21 used in the search of Malaysia Airline flight 370.

One of major challenges in developing vehicles for deep sea exploration is the failure of materials at joints. 3D printing can completely eliminate the need for joining panels to construct these underwater vehicles.

In future, both the teams in collaboration will work on optimizing the material properties such as designing the syntactic foam which will be used in various depth of ocean in underwater vehicles.