The Research And Development Of Chocolate 3D Printer Based On Rapid Prototyping Technology

With the demands in high-end consumer market,people's requirements for molding technology and devices of the fluid food materials like chocolate also increase.In the traditional molding technique,the prepared chocolate cream is poured into specially-made mold till it cools down.This production method can be cost-effective and fast,suitable for mass-production by chocolate manufacturers.However,nowadays,consumers increasingly prefer those personalized custom-made articles,and popular consumption goods produced in batches are never able to satisfy the high-end consumer markets.Meanwhile,for chocolate's high heat sensitivity,it is not easy for the processing and storage.With the gradually mature rapid proto-typing technology,the chocolate production mode based on it starts to appear.At present,among leading 3D printers for chocolate at home,most of them are directly built based on the platform of ordinary desktop-level 3D printers.Since the whole system is not designed for chocolate's peculiar characters,the results of most chocolate 3D printers are not satisfactory,and some machines even can't fulfill the 3D printing of chocolate.In this thesis,chocolate's physical properties are firstly analyzed,and then the architectural design,simulation and model machine experiments of the chocolate 3D printer based on rapid proto-typing technology are carried out,as the specific works are shown as follows:(1)Various kinds of factors influencing the chocolate 3D printing results against the rheological behavior of chocolate have been investigated,and a 3D modeling for chocolate 3D intelligent printer have been proposed to design the structure of a chocolate 3D intelligent printing;(2)Solidworks Simulation-based finite-element analysis on the major structural components and supporting parts of chocolate 3D intelligent printer has been implemented,and optimization has been carried out to those unreasonable parts after knowing their stress states;(3)The control circuit and control methods of chocolate 3D intelligent printer are studied;furthermore,they are optimized to acquire the optimum temperature ranges for printing different chocolate materials.