Patent from China

 

For some reason, they blocked me, since March, access to the blog's control panel, and now I can only get here through Tor, which is not very convenient for me. Apparently blocking from Kazakhstan, it is not clear what and why, and what the consequences, but oh well.

I got my first patent from China and hopefully there will be others.
The patented extruder is designed to work with various materials: ceramic, metal (metal powder) pastes and the like, various polymers, silicones and similar materials, melts of metals and alloys (liquid metal).

 

 

The common task is to develop a universal extruder for working with various materials, the main direction is printing with liquid metal. A universal printer is needed that can work with a wide range of materials with minimal replacement of components and equipment - instead of a set of printers. Therefore, the working chamber is made removable, so that it would be easy to replace it when printing with different materials, and the print head is separate from the unit for supplying raw materials to the primary chamber and the mechanisms of the unit may be different.
The principle of operation of this extruder is quite simple: the material for printing is fed into the primary chamber - the buffer, from where it enters the working chamber of the rotary piston pump, which squeezes the working material through the nozzle onto the surface under construction. The design features of the working chamber and the movement of the rotor-piston in it allows, during operation, to simultaneously suck in material from the primary chamber and squeeze it out of the working chamber from the opposite side, which ensures continuous extrusion. This is how the process looks like.
The very supply of material to the buffer - the drive can be organized in different ways, depending on the material. This can be a wire feed that melts, fills a buffer - storage, ceramic or metal paste from cartridges that is fed into the primary chamber, there are many options and can be selected depending on the design of the printer itself, a movable table or a movable head.
A similar printing scheme, using a buffer-accumulator for the melt, is now used by a German company in its large-format printer. The printer is good. I agree with their opinion that this is a revolution in 3D printing by extrusion and, perhaps, it can even be looked at wider. I don’t know how they did it physically (it would be interesting to see), I didn’t find patents of their extruder, only a trademark, probably some kind of pump made of gears.
 I have seen different designs based on gear pumps, but such designs work with viscous materials and are not suitable for printing with molten metals. To work with metals, as well as with liquids, the working chamber must be sealed at the "cylinder-piston" level, which is ensured by my design.
The development and implementation of this printing method will remove many barriers, the mere possibility of printing with metal using conventional materials in the form of wire or melting broken parts opens up broad prospects. How quickly this will happen, I do not know. You don't think that a simple inventor will roll out a ready-made solution for everyone out of his garage. I just showed the direction and to the best of my ability I am going along this path, whether it is your choice for you to go.