3D Printer for Plastic Bag Welding

While I haven’t personally tried it, according to Koppany Horvath, you can use a soldering iron to fuse plastic sheets together by hand. Logically, one could fuse such sheets with a robot, and since a 3D printer has the ability to drag a hot nozzle over something at a controlled temperature and speed, this would seem like an ideal and readily-available platform. With the proper control, Koppany theorized that such a technique could be leveraged to create pneumatic actuators for soft robots, and it would certainly have a variety of other uses.

Horvath's plastic welding experimentation focused on using sandwich bags from Subway, which normally house a single sub. His article goes through his process, including writing a Python (2.7) script to generate the printer G-code. The code is designed to vary temperature and speed in an x/y grid, and his mechanical setup consists of wrapping the nozzle in aluminum foil and coating the bed with cardboard.

In the end, or at this point at least, the experiment was not successful. On the other hand, this hacker lists a few possible improvements. These include the possibility of using spring-mounted surface for constant pressure, or a different work surface. Perhaps the concept could work on a thicker bag or other material, so hopefully we’ll see more development in the future.

There was also a small issue with meatball marinara sauce, so be sure to use clean bags if you try this experiment!