Extending the 3D food printing tests at high speed. Material deposition and effect of non-printing movements on the final quality of printed structures

Abstract

3D Food Printing has unprecedented ambitions but for its practical use the increase of the speed of material deposition is a challenge to tackle. We have extended the information on this aspect by using a workflow that analyzes the screw-based deposition, at medium-high speed and the effect of some undervalued variables on the quality of 3D printed cereal-based structure. The most familiar approach utilized to compute the right extrusion rate for a good replica of the 3D virtual model completely fails at high print speed. Improvements would be possible only by using a flow of 300% or by changing, as input data, the diameter of filament at 1.0 mm. However, additional irregularities are caused by undervalued variables such as retraction distance being the most important for the printing quality while the travel speed and retraction speed are crucial to reduce printing time. Finally, desirability approach was able to define the conditions capable to get a maximum desirability of 0.85 at speed of 200 mm/s.