This week we worked on applying the feedback we received from our PDR and began investigating new materials and mechanisms. We continued to perform more experimenting with potato, varying print settings and the mixture of potato flakes and water to try and improve print quality. Some examples of these prints are in the attached image gallery. While we continue to experiment with different materials in our current setup we are also working on designing our own custom extruders and extrusion methods. We hope to show some of this in the upcoming weeks and will continue to update our blog with new developments!

This past Monday (10/23), the team and our Coach Phillip Jackson took a trip to Boca Raton, FL to present our Preliminary Design Review to Newell Brands! We met our Liaison Engineer Brian Arnhart and some other amazing engineers on the Product Development team at Newell. Some of our other activities included a Brainstorming Session, Oster Blender testing Lab Tour, PDE Manager Presentation, and lunch with the team.

We are very excited to apply the feedback received from our PDR presentation and hit the ground running with some more experimenting! In the next several weeks, we will be mainly focusing on trying out new food materials and creating a polished final CAD design of our project!

This week, the team focused on prepping for the Preliminary Design Review Peer Review presentations! Here is a sneak peek of our new, revamped slide deck template (Special thanks to Canva). We are still working towards completing the content that we would like to cover for the PDR and practicing our presentation skills as well! This week was also a continuation of more food printing in the lab with potatoes and chocolate. We’re looking forward to gaining feedback from our project so far and also to see some other amazing IPPD projects!

This week we spent a lot of time in the lab. We got the three printers in our possession up and working. The two Prusas are working well, and we printed a few test prints. the chocolate printer on the Ender 3 took up most of our time as we tried to get it working. A few of us spent quite a few hours tinkering and trying various combinations of temperatures, preparation techniques, and procedures to get the chocolate printer running reliably. In the end we managed to produce some quite good results as shown below, but this is far from the easy, reliable performance we aim to achieve with our prototype. As we move into next week we are working to prepare our PDR presentation for our peer review and get ready to present our progress so far to Newell.

This week was the beginning of us working on our Preliminary design review. We started collecting and reviewing all the work we’ve done so far and refining it into a single document to present in a few weeks. We turned in our first draft on Thursday and look forwards to further refining and improving it over our upcoming meetings. Our research into scholarly articles and patent searches continue, we presented some preliminary findings to our sponsor and continue to find more exciting innovations and opportunities in the field.

While we continue our search for written knowledge we have also made strides in our practical knowledge of 3D printers. This week we took a look at a chocolate 3D printer provided by Newell and some Prusas that Dr Jackson was kind enough to let us tinker with. All of them had issues when they came to us which have since been fixed. It was a great learning experience and an opportunity to get hands on with the subject of our project. We look forward to doing more experiments and tinkering with the chocolate printer as we go forwards.

What a week! Last week we met with the lab director and toured the IPPD workspace and Prototyping lab. Lots of great work to be done and we look forward to working with Larry and Jeff Bieling. Research continues! We met with one of the UF library’s research librarians and learned the ins and outs of patent searches and the best ways to find relevant scholarly articles. We look forward to leveraging these resources in our continued research into the cutting edge of food printers and printing technology. This week we presented our revised version of our logo and received Sponsor approval for it and our team name. It’s official now! As part of our research next weel we are taking possession of some FDM printers courtesy of Dr Jackson to tinker with and gain a more hands on understanding of the 3D printing process. We also received a chocolate 3d printer from our sponsor that we look forward to tinkering and experimenting with. 

This week was another busy one, we met again with our sponsor and went over some of our preliminary research and presented some of our use cases and concepts we’ve generated. Additionally we met with some faculty to learn more about food 3d printing, thank you again Dr. Watson! We learned about current products on the market while going over the university’s food 3d printer. We discussed the pros and cons of the current products on the market and where our design can innovate and bring new functionality to the 3d printed food space.

In class and over the week we individually went over the scope of work document and put together a list of requirements and specifications. We met and discussed these, and going into next week we will be refining and evaluating these requirements for our final prototype as well as developing a house of quality and most important specifications.

Greetings and welcome to the 3Delish team blog! We are excited to be working with Newell Brands in bringing the emerging technology of food 3D printing into the home! Over the course of the next 2 semesters, we aim to research existing 3D printed food solutions, select a unique design use case and system, and create a prototype suitable for novice use in producing food at the press of a button. 

This was the first week we got to work on this project after having our schedule disrupted by hurricane Idalia. As such, we have been working quickly to make up for lost time and get a running start on this project. We met with team coach Dr. Jackson and familiarized ourselves with the given project scope of work and expectations from Newell Brands. We have additionally reached out to UF faculty who currently have research regarding 3D Food Printing, and have scheduled times to understand existing machine designs and capabilities. This week we also met with our company liaisons from Newell Brands, and clarified team questions regarding the given design requirements of the project as well as the available company resources we can leverage in our work.