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Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Possible new polymer

If RepRap could use the aliphatic polyester polylactic acid (PLA) as its primary working polymer that would be good. The advantages would be that it:
  1. Has a low melting point (150 C; glass transition: 60 C),
  2. Is mechanically pretty strong [yield: 70 MPa (nylon: 80 MPa); modulus: 3.2 GPa (nylon: 3 GPa)],
  3. Is biodegradable, and
  4. Can be made from biomass.
Actually, as Vik and I have pointed out before, having a polymer that is biodegradable is a disadvantage, as it means that products made from it don't lock up atmospheric carbon (but all these recycling directives that insist on it are written by politicians, so what do you expect?). But if the polymer comes from biomass, then at least the whole process is carbon-neutral.

In the case of PLA, the polymer can be made by the fermentation of corn (maize), a crop that will grow in poor soils in a very wide range of climatic conditions. This allows the possibility of having the RepRap machine make its own fermenter, and then having a manufacturing process for high-technology goods that could be bootstrapped straight from an agrarian base with very little capital expenditure. Rich World look out: here come the African farmers :-)

A good source of information on PLA is Rafael A. Auras's Powerpoint file available here.

A colleague of mine at Bath is working on the stuff too, and has promised me a sample. So experiments on it will be blogged in the near future...

P.S. - an excellent paper on polylactic acid production by Narayanan et al. can be found here.
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6 comments:

  1. vik-olliverJune 22, 2005 7:56 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. vik-olliverJune 22, 2005 9:50 PM

    A couple of "thoughts from the bath":

    Is this patented?

    Can it be subtly modified to prevent biodegrading?

    The PowerPoint presentation plays fine in OpenOffice, by the way.

    Vik :v)

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  3. vik-olliverJune 23, 2005 5:27 AM

    Biodegrading is a problem when it happens unexpectedly. It releases the carbon into the atmosphere, and prevents you from recycling the material - so you have to make some more. Not very environmentally friendly.

    But we need not worry too much as both Polymorph (polycaprolactone) and PLA need to be raised to 60C before they will biodegrade. This temperature is generally found in the centre of compost heaps, so careful siting of the RepRap will ensure durability :)

    Vik :v)

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  4. Simon McAuliffeJune 26, 2005 10:54 AM

    That's pretty cool!

    So I have some corn, and a kitchen. How to I make myself some PLA? :)

    Is the process particularly complex, or is it something that could be carried out by a reprap produced machine?

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  5. Adrian BowyerJune 26, 2005 1:26 PM

    That's something I'm looking into. Certainly the first stage is a fermentation of the corn with a microbe (i.e. like home-brew beer...). But I'm not sure about the polymerisation step. For some plastics that requires hundreds of bars of pressure, funny catalysts, and high temperatures. I'll report back when I find out, and I think I'll set a student project to make some...

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  6. vik-olliverJune 29, 2005 11:44 PM

    I'm in touch with a couple of local suppliers who say they can get bulk polycaprolactone (Polymorph) and polylactic acid (PLA). The standard delivery container seems to be the 25kg bag.

    Vik :v)

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