Shilament

Shilament is OSE's brand of recycled, mixed material 3D filament obtained from post-consumer waste.

The mixtures must be quality controlled and compatible so that materials with similar melting points and properties are used to attain quality prints. There is a whole range of formulas to be developed for what exactly is a suitable filament for 3D printing. The advantage of plastics is that a wide range of mixes, copolymers, blends, and composites can be used combining plastic, rubber, wood, ceramic, metal, and other powders, fibers, or admixtures.

Quality Control

• Depending on the amount of effort and skill of the producer - filaments can be made up to tightly-controlled composition if the feedstocks are known and uniform. With nonuniform feedstocks, the challenge is to work out blends that work - and this is a good point for crowdsourcing of thousands of different formulas based on localized sourcing.
• Note that Shilament formulas with hard-to-print materials such as polyethylene, propylene, or high temperature ones such as PEI - can be printed only using a high-temperature printer. OSE is developing such a printer in 2020.
• Recommended is 0.8 and larger nozzles for fast printing of large objects. The worst case accuracy For 3 mm filament is such that layer thickness can vary by 20% if 20% filament width tolerance is used in the absence of a filament width sensor. This is such that the outer surface can have up to 160 micron (<1/5 mm) naccuracy. For bulk objects, such as 2x4 lumber, that means overall one-millionth deviation, which is still orders of magnitude better than commercial lumber.

If a filament width sensor is utilized, this means that prints are perfect regardless of filement tolerances.