[Norbert Heinz] has been busy for the 2021 Hackaday Prize entry, working on the design of a direct granule extruder for 3D printing with waste materials, or materials that are not provided in the form of a filament. Sugar is pretty common in most households, so since that’s already available in granular form, [Norbert] gave 3D printing with granulated sugar a try. (Video, embedded below.)

[Editor’s note: He earned fifth place for this one! Well, not the sugar in particular, but the overall great work on granular extruders.]

Success was somewhat variable, as the gloopy material is notoriously fickle to work with, but the setup did produce some structures that stayed in one piece, at least for a while. Initially [Norbert] tried it real slow, effectively printing with the liquified sweet stuff, by dragging a molten blob of it around on the end of the extruder nozzle. Whilst this did work, the resulting print resolution did leave something to be desired. The next thing tried was increased print speed. This produced clearer prints, as the sugar did not have time to caramelise, or form a noticeable blob, but as soon as the bed started to cool, it caused it to crack badly.

Going slow seemed to be the way forward, as more time to cool may have reduced the stresses in the structure due to the increased cooling time. But anyway, the way we see it, is it’s fun trying, and if it fails, you can just eat it, so long as you disregard all that food safety stuff anyway.

[Norbert] documents the granule extruder journey on the project Hackaday.io page, so it should be straightforward enough to duplicate this is you were so inclined.

We’ve covered a few sugary hacks before; Need a renewable bed adhesive? out of glue stick? try sugar as a bed adhesive! Printing in gloopy, sloppy materials is nothing new at all, we covered it nearly ten years ago.

Thanks to [Nils] for the tip!

Great effort and being one of the winners is well deserved!

One of the first cases of a “3d printer” that I’ve encountered, was “CandyFab”, which printed by melting a bed filled with sugar with hot air.

Wow, CNCkitchen is behind. Would be great for erotic gifts :D

Finally a true water soluble support material! (And delicious).

Bingo! This is the /point/ which I’m surprised is not being mentioned by people more often. It’s very brittle, easy to just crush and wipe away, or drop in water.

I love it, but it needs butter (toffee) or cream (caramel) added into the nozzle (with a tiny amount of salt).

Or both butter and cream (Butterscotch) using unrefined sugar.

3D Printed Sugar Rocket Motors…

Even better, imagine an entire sugar delivery system that is also sugar powered and can use the entire body of the rocket as fuel.

…starting the Sugar Age of mankind ;-)

I wonder if isomalt would be more forgiving.

Isomalt doesn’t decompose at the melting temperature as sucrose does. Might be worth a try.

Does it help to improve flexibility avoiding cracks if you mixit with some kind of gelatin?

The higher molecular weight of gelatin would also probably increase the viscosity of the extruded material making it easier to print with

I will give that a try, thanks!

Great project but the title of “fifty shades of brown” really strikes me the wrong way.. I’m glad it’s brown sugar though.

Jmil (Jordan Miller) made this one a few years back https://github.com/jmil/BariCUDA https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26343 For printing sugar glass.

He used it to print the vascular structure which would be inside livers/kidneys from sugar glass which was then washed away and pumped with nutrients. Got published in some medical papers too. https://youtu.be/0MT7SQq8HV4

Dude… what a sweet project!!! Teeheeeheee

That’s a sweet 3d printer!

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