YOUNG, engineering minds wowed visitors with 20 ingenious design projects they proudly displayed at the annual Mechanical Engineering Open Day at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Howard College campus.
The fourth year engineering students displayed months’ worth of hard work to evaluators, sponsors, parents and the public.
The projects form part of the degree requirements in final year Design and Research Project modules. Students are allocated projects in groups of three or four other students at the beginning of the year. The projects provide the opportunity to gain experience for the working world and put the skills learned throughout their degrees to the test.
Nzuzo Nene, Aravind Arunakirinathar and Divya Naidoo, supervised by Avern Athol-Webb, spent much of this year developing a desktop 3D food printer with a gear pump design that eliminates the need to constantly replace syringes.
Naidoo said that 3D printing of food represents a new frontier in the culinary industry, where printers are being used to save time and effort, and to pioneer elaborate and original designs and ingredients. They are used throughout the culinary world, in commercial kitchens, bakeries, confectionaries and by hobbyists. NASA even commissioned a 3D food printer design for use by astronauts on deep space missions. The group also mentioned the potential for 3D printers to be used to combat the global challenge of food scarcity by producing healthy, nutritious food on a mass scale.
For their design, the team noted that in order to print foodstuffs, food is required in a liquid or paste form for extrusion, with existing 3D printers using syringes to deposit the food onto the print bed. The group focused on improving this syringe mechanism to eliminate the need to swap out syringes when the food is depleted. They achieved this by developing a unique gear pump extruder inspired by ChocoL3D’s chocolate extruder. To test this design against existing syringe mechanism designs, they developed a syringe pump that will print the same foods as the gear pump and compare print resolution, height and accuracy.
The group also focused on the print bed, as regular 3D printers usually make use of a heated print bed for materials going from a solid to liquid state, the reverse of what happens in a 3D food printer. In a 3D food printer, a cooling bed is therefore more suitable, leading the trio to design a cooling bed with thermoelectric coolers.
At the recent Open Day, the team used chocolate as their printing material, although the printer can accommodate other types of food by making small adjustments to its settings. They demonstrated their extruder designs and undertook experimental tests on different types of chocolate. They also showed visitors a video or live demonstration of their syringe pump icing a cake.
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