PSI - Issue 33

Taoufik Hachimi et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 33 (2021) 907 – 916 HACHIMI Taoufik et al. / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2021) 000–000

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2.3.12. The flanges: Two flanges with an inner diameter of 25mm and three holes of 8mm screws, used in the system one is welded and the other is screwed, both attached to both ends of the steer tube against the support plates to stabilize and guide the movement of the raw materials. 2.3.13. Support plates: two support plates are used, one is welded and the other is screwed, this strategy is simply make it easy to disassemble the steer tube when cleaning the screw inside of it. the supports have a rectangle bottom surface with four 3mm screws. their role is to maintain the position of the hooper and the whole system as well. 2.3.14. The coupler: a metal cylinder that stands between the motor and the reciprocating screw, so when the motor rotates it couples it with the screw resulting in translation movement of the raw materials towards the heated tube. the cylinder has an outer diameter of 22.5mm and an inner one of 8mm that fits the reciprocating screw, so to maintain its position on top of both the screw in the motor arbor, we added two holes at its lateral area one with 7mm in its diameter and the other with 5.5, both will be filled with their correspondent screws.

3. Result and Discussion 3.1. Extruder machine manufacturing:

The machine was assembled by computer-aided design as the Fig. 9(a) shown, and manufactured using the fabrication’s machines. The extruder machine shown in Fig. 9(b) was tested using PA6 polymer, with 230°C which is the molding temperature. It must be mention that the highest temperature achieved by the machine is 350°C, but in order to provide a safety factor, we worked with lower temperatures. a b

Fig. 9. (a) Filament extruder machine design; (b) Filament extruder machine manufacturing

3.2. Filament extrusion The filaments were produced with two different diametres 1,75mm and 2.5mm, it must be mention that those results came after many test based on modeling of the raw material and the motor speed.