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EN
Continously Extruding 3D Printed Tubes with Compressed Air
['Aaron Beckendorf', 'William Mays', 'Jeff Nme']
Hackaday
[Jan] of [Roetz 4.0] has a unique approach to multi-material 3D printing: he’s designed an extruder which takes two different materials and extrudes one as a shell around the other.
During testing with PLA, it seemed capable of extruding airtight tubes of filament, though it had a tendency to blow bubbles and form tubes with inconsistent diameters.
The low thermal conductivity of the stainless steel extruder also proved problematic; coupled with the cooling effect of the compressed air, filament sometimes solidified inside the extruder.
He also switched to using TPU filament, which greatly improved layer adhesion.
When inflated with compressed air, the finished TPU structures expanded slightly, though there were still air leaks.