User:Matthew R Skorski/Notebook/Cellulose Summer 2014/2014/10/08

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Entry title Purpose: Create 25 g cast of TiO2 5% and mix 1% filament in Dr. Fox's extruder Safety and Procedure: Normal large casting, see 6/18/14, but with 250 mL of acetone instead of 200. ________ for Dr. Fox's extruder instructions. Experimental: Created a 25 g TiO2 cast Mass % Mass TiO2 Mass ABS 5.0% 1.2500 g 23.7501 g Added 250 mL acetone to TiO2. Sonicated from 9:25 am to 9:30 am at 20°C to 21°C. Added ABS and sonicated from 9:30 am at 21°C to 5:10 pm at 44°C. Heated the pan at 80°C from 5:10 pm to 6:50 pm. Tried printing raftless dogbones using 10/3/14 specs but failed. Changed "outlines" and "firstlayer" back to original specs to try with a raft. The rafted dogbones failed too. The nozzle was cleaned out but this did not aid in extruding the filament. The printing bed was cleaned with isopropyl alcohol in order to rid the bed of any contaminants and dirt. The old tape covering the bed was replaced with new gold kapton polyimide. A raftless dogbone on high settings, not the dogbone profile. To make the dogbones more precise the feedrates in the Dogbone profile will be lowered. All of the feed rates for "bridges", "firstlayer", "firstlayerraft", "infill", "insets", "outlines", and "raftbase" were changed from their previous values which were the standard rates that come with a new profile. One raftless dogbone was made using the standard ABS labeled "ABS NR1" with NR standing for no raft. The 10% filament that went through Dr. Fox's extruder from the previous day in lab was cut up and run through the Filabot extruder. As the filament was coming out wavey and not straight the temperature was lowered from 180°C at 177°C. The filament appeared to get thinner near the bottom end of the filament. This seemed to occur only after the hopper was empty of polymer. The filament came out a tannish color as usual. Cut up the 1% filaments casted on 10/1 and 10/3 into small pieces for Dr. Fox's extruder. Massed total and measured 52.8513 g. After running though Dr. Fox's extruder just 48.7314 g were measured. Mass of run in Dr. Fox's extruder 1: 10.97918 g 2: 10.44270 g 3: 10.10504 g 4: 10.70334 g 5: 11.55620 g Mass of samples to examine molecular weight. All tubes are labeled II to indicate this is the second sample of 1%. Post Cast 1(PC1) 0.04434 g 1st Extrusion 1 (1E1) 0.05812 g 1st Scrape 1 (1S1) 0.05775 g 2nd Extrusion 1 (2E1) 0.05763 g 2nd Scrape 1 (2S1) 0.04110 g 3rd Extrusion 1 (3E1) 0.04355 g 3rd Scrape 1 (3S1) 0.04813 g 4th Extrusion 1 (4E1) 0.04898 g 4th Scrape 1 (4S1) 0.05720 g 5th Extrusion 1 (5E1) 0.05682 g 5th Scrape 10 (5S1) 0.04679 g The ABS-TiO2 was run just like the 9/24 procedure. However, Dr. Fox showed me a new method to cleaning the sticky polymer in the extractor. The first step is to do a run of 1:2 purge PE like usual and then keeping the valve open put pure PE in as well. This will immediately sweep out any leftover polymer. Then two more runs of 1:2 purge PE were run and then 1 run of pure PE that is extracted and then one run of pure PE that is cooled down. This method did not seem to be very effective. A thin layer of polymer still coated all the components of the mixer and had to be scraped off very carefully. The casting came out well. It was smooth except for the ridges formed from the evaporating acetone. Light leopard spotting was present as well as 2 ABS chunks. Figure 1: 5% ABS, the ridges seemed more pronounced than normal but the leopard spots were less noticeable than in previous casts.