МOSCOW (MRC) -- In recent years, many filament manufacturers have set their sights on adopting those durable and low-cost plastics that are already widely used throughout society, said 3ders.
And for a long time, one of those plastics has been conspicuously absent from the list of 3D printable materials: PVC. The third most used plastic in the world, PVC is very durable, cheap, very resistant to the elements and fire retardant. Perfect, you’d think, for 3D printers. Fortunately, Australian PVC developer Chemson Pacific has now produced a 3D printable version of PVC called 3DVinyl.
Chemson Pacific is the Australian branch of the Chemson Group, and is specialized in developing and producing non-toxic and non-heavy metal stabilizer plastics. They usually work with PVC, and have previously developed several industrial PVC applications. Using all that expertise, they say, they have now been able to produce an all-Australian 3D printable PVC filament.
As they reveal to 3ders.org, 3DVinyl would not even be here if it wasn’t for one temporary lab technician called Dennis Planner. A big fan of 3D printing, he approached colleague Greg Harrison and asked him why Chemson wasn’t involved in 3D printing.
Over a two year R&D period, which involved various experts such as Dr. Leo Hyde of DuPont, Marc Jolivet of PMMCO and experts from AIO Robotics, this grew into 3DVinyl. And as the company explains, they feel that their custom PVC formulation can bring truly thermoplastic properties to 3D printing. It has the power, they say, to significantly broaden the list of 3D printing applications, and is suitable for both home users and industrial manufacturing environments. Copying all the key properties of PVC, 3DVinyl filament is UV and solvent resistant, weatherproof, "Group 1" Fire retardant (capable of AS3837 compliance), and requires 50 per cent fewer fossil fuel inputs than many other filaments ((3DVinyl uses abundant natural gas while some incumbents are derived from crude oil). Its also very rigid, features excellent flow properties and heat stability, and doesn’t even suffer from warping or poor bed adhesion. 3D Vinyl also produces fantastic support structures.
MRC