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Fruit bowl
- This topic has 15 replies, 11 voices, and was last updated 3 years ago by
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Hi all,
as Dave mentioned in the news section (here) a bunch of students from the TU Delft involved in the Materials for Design course run at the faculty of Industrial Design have been using the machines in teams of two for a couple of afternoons over the past 10 weeks. I was one of them and here’s what we (one teammate & I) did, hope it sparks some inspiration for more applications:
For a bit of context, the proces was run according to the Material Driven Design method, (for those interested in it: the paper) hence the emphasis on vision and story 😉
Anyway, we were interested in the story that used plastics can tell about their owner, and how this can be used in a product. We figured a growing fruit-bowl would be a good concept for this so we devised a simple mold to make one such thing using the oven.
I think the little clip we made tells it more or less, you can access it here using the password VeryPrecious
We’ve used various plastics (mainly PP, PE, PLA) and heated those in the oven, playing around with the temperature and material mixes. If interested I’ll gladly answer questions about this!
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thanks for sharing here @arie, always inspiring to see other plastic creations. Nice project, love the video!
@emelisa You can create a new discussion topic on http://onearmy.world/community/forums/forum/precious-plastic/development/ describing which machine are you trying to build, what have you achieved so far with the machine construction, and what are your questions exactly.
That will help you to get a faster response.
Nice idea @Arie, it could be a very helpful tool to spread the project. Cheers!
I’m promoting the idea of to create a Mould Design Community (or a mould repository) to faster start-ups here http://onearmy.world/community/forums/topic/mould-design-community-what-if/ Your point of view, experience and knowledge are very welcome!
I would love to know more about the experience you had with plastics, @Arie, as I’m trying to figure out a process for easy and fast clasification. I’ve read about the use of laser lights to identify diferent plastics and I would love to investigate on this question of clasification. Any idea or suggestion?
Hi Dario,
We used a method like this one. Very rudimentary way of identifying plastics, but it worked for us. We didn’t get into any more advanced methods, so I can’t help you out with lasers I’m afraid 😉 The recycling industry must have proper procedures for separating plastics that might be worth looking into. I guess if you properly arrange the steps in the documents you could turn it into some kind of ‘classification line’ with several baths one after another.
Curious what you end up with! it was a tedious job to do I recall.
Hi @arie
I’m very interested in your experiences from the project, especially the fact that you didn’t apply any pressure in the oven (correct?). Would you mind sharing some of your experiences concerning oven temperature and time, if you still remember? 🙂
Best regards Chris
Hi Chris,
Indeed, no pressure was used. I can’t find the exact figures concerning oven temperature and time, but what I can recall from the top of my head is that it pays off to be patient, we’ve burned quite some samples by setting the temp too high, wanting to be quicker, but taking a slightly longer time and a lower temperature was better (could take half an hour easily, depending on the amount of plastic, grain size etc. though). Check the materials you’re using for their melting points and burning points.
We primarily used PLA which works brilliantly in the oven, it becomes nice and ‘runny’ other plastics tend to stay more viscous.
One trick, as you can see in your video, is using an oven thermometer. The temperature difference throughout the oven was significant so it helps to have a correct reading of the temperature at the height of your sample. (that is, if you’re using the PP machines).
Hope this helps already, if you have more specific questions I can see if I can answer those as well.
Enjoy!
Hi Arie
Thank you very much for your reply. It was very fulfilling. I will keep experimenting 😉 I’m mainly focused on learning how to easily process HPDE and PP, due to the huge amount of the two types which is found in landfills.
But thanks again!
As a side note, I’m actually coming to TU Delft tomorrow for an exchange semester. Just a funny coincidence 😛
Chris
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