Feb.23, 2014
Chocolate is an interesting and challenging material to work with because it requires accurate control of viscosity and temperature conditions. The melting point of chocolate is between 86° F (30° C) and 90° F (32° C). When the chocolate cools back to room temperature it will harden again. Although chocoate has a very narrow working potential for extrusion, you still can do a lot of interesting thing with it. If you can control the temperature, chocolate is a material which is particularly well suited for extrusion 3D printing.
UK based artist potter Jonathan Keep, creator of Delta Ceramic 3D Printer, pushes the boundaries of his medium with 3D-printing technologies. Keep has been experimenting with chocolate 3D printing and he managed to create a low-cost method to 3d print chocolate at home. He replaced the extruder of his Delta printer with a syringe which is air pressure powered from a soda bottle and bicycle pump.
Keep explains how the system works:
Predicting that liquid chocolate would not need much pressure to extrude I abandoned my normal studio air compressor and cobbled together a fizzy drinks bottle compressed air system. I believe a fizzy drinks bottle can withstand up to 6 Bar of pressure so with my bicycle pump and only pressurizing the system to 1 Bar it was not stressing too much. The pressure needed to extrude the chocolate as I turned up the regulator did not register on the pressure gage so I cannot say what it was but the rate of flow was controllable. One priming of the fizz bottle with the bicycle pump was enough pressure for a syringe of chocolate. I began printing onto cling film, then gloss card, on top of a ceramic tile that I had put into the deepfreeze. This was to help re-solidify the chocolate as it printed.
With a syringe, bicycle pump, and fizzy drinks bottle this print head could be cobbled together and attached to any RepRap type 3D printer.
The video below demonstrates this simple extrusion method to 3D print with chocolate.
Posted in 3D Printers
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hi tthere ! i'm doing a small project like tha. Could you please sent to me file and how did you do that ? thank you in advance !
Anonymous wrote at 3/8/2016 10:00:06 PM:
What brand and kind of syringe did you use? How did you keep air out?
Anonymous wrote at 4/11/2015 1:29:15 PM:
Epic!
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