RUG/Pennsylvania/State College/Printers/BioFab@Home/Research

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Fabwithjello.jpg
FAB@HOME LOGOPrototype.png
BioFab@Home
Color: Acrylic
Extruder: Syringe
Temperature: -
Design: Fab@Home
Electronics: RAMPS
Firmware: Marlin


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6/20/2014

Today, we made a two gelatin slurries, one with store-bought Knox gelatin, and the other with Sigma Aldrich, 300-bloom gelatin. Both 40ml slurries had .2g of NaCl added along with the standard 100 mM CaCl2. Salt apparently slows the solidification of the gel, which is what we currently struggle to prevent. However the Knox brand solidified as usual, yet the Sigma brand maintained a medium viscosity for long enough for us to print. The Sigma brand gelatin slurry was also much clearer. We are unsure if it is the bloom value of the Sigma brand that could be creating this difference in behavior (the Knox brand is about 225 bloom), or manufacturing differences between food-grade gelatin and 'scientific' grade gelatin. Either way, we plan to use Sigma Aldrich gelatin from this point forward, as it seems to produce much more consistent results.

We printed two cylinders into the Sigma gelatin. The initial cylinder had 10 perimeters, which ended up globing up the nozzle tip and prevented any real precise extrusion. The other cylinder had 2 perimeters and seemed to hold its shape pretty well.

The prints are remaining in the gelatin until Monday (to ensure good cross-linking), where we will attempt to investigate the prints.

Next week we will likely be refining the recipe for the gelatin slurries in hopes to find one that is supporting of the gel.