This week the team is preparing for upcoming Prototype Inspection Day. For our installation we plan to have 2 builds for different delivery methods of food extrusion, a live running demo of the off the shelf LuckyBot module, video compilation of the prior prints in lab, as well as all of the food prints we have completed with different food materials.

For food, we are printing with: Mashed Potato (Instant Mix), Frosting, Jelly, Chocolate, Butter, & Fruit Gummies. We also tried printing with a crust mixture (Food Processed Crackers + Butter) to mimic that of a cheesecake crust; this mixture however, was too thick to be extruded.

The DOE is intended to display the results of print quality across a wide variety of foods with different rheological properties, as well as different printer settings. Some foods are more dependent on temperature, such as chocolate, and others are more dependent on consistency (wt %) like mashed potatoes. In terms of printer settings, we can alter things like the retraction distance or z-hop to help increase the resolution of fine details in the print and reduce stringing that happens in the print as material is still extruded in the travel steps.

The goal of our DOE is to understand the optimal food preparation parameters (temp, wt %, etc.) as well as printer settings (flow rate, retraction, etc.) so that we can have the material performing well as we develop our own extrusion module.

In this process, we have come across a lot of unsuccessful prints. Please pay your respects to our Print Graveyard below, RIP 🪦.