First, here’s a link to my previous Q which lead me to post the below question. Scroll down to the post about spring-filled pillow:
Which leads to this question:
Can 3D printers print styrofoam popcorn made of a:
(1) raw material
(2) well-thought-out design
…which would be bio-friendly to use as pillow stuffing?
For example, there’s some types of styrofoam popcorn which clings to everything.
But the other type is more plasticky and seems a bit more human-friendly for purposes of stuffing inside a pillow case.
So can the human-friendly styrofoam be designed in a way that the sum total of each would become a very comfortable pillow, so that people with 3D printers can then print out a bunch of new pillow stuffing whenever they need it? And even submit the depleted popcorn to any store for recycling?
For a second I thought of creating a 3D model of your head and then creating a part that would complement it perfectly and cradle it. But that would be made of hard plastic.
If you can think of the shape for the foam element I would expect the way to do it is 3D print a mold for that shape, or a dozen of them to get it done quicker, and then fill them with foam to get your pillow stuffing.
I only wonder what foam material you would use that is going to be something you want your face in for a nights sleep.
Your typical 3D printing materials are going to be plastic and nylon and rubbery stuff–probably not materials you want to stuff a pillow with (except maybe the rubbery stuff). Some people get into novelty materials like sugar, chocolate, tea, and Easy Cheese, but what will be most widely available are the materials I mentioned. (Metal is becoming more and more available, but I figure metal in a pillow is right out.)
Also, this would be a very expensive, inefficient way to produce stuffing materials. The material’s expensive, you have to wait a few hours for it to be built up in a print run, and you don’t have the diminishing costs with volume like you would by, say, distributing the cost of a mold over hundreds or thousands (or millions) of injection molds.
Now, where you could benefit from 3D printing is to make a pattern around which you pour the mold that’s going be used to form the stuffing, because even though it’s pricet relative to volume manufacturing, compared to other more traditional methods of tooling it’s pretty cheap, and in fact it is being use more and more for initial tooling. For this, you wouldn’t want a Makerbot, because the finished would be horrible. For mold making, you want something that gives you a smooth finish, such as Polyjet or Stereolithography.
Why would you want to 3D print styrofoam popcorn? It’s not like the precise shape of that stuff matters. Just keep extruding them like they do now, and skip all the printer-parts other than the extruder.
None of the current 3D printing processes produce anything like expanded polystyrene, which is made by… expanding polystyrene pellets so they become filled with voids, light and squishy; in a way like shaving foam coming out of a can.
For what is worth I have tested polystyrene filament (high impact polystyrene, HIPS, to be precise) and besides being about 20% lighter than ABS or PLA, what you can print with it is not the stuff for stuffing.
OK, so consider this thread wrapped up, and I thank you all for your answers. I now see that “aerated” styrofoam isn’t feasible via 3D.
BTW the precise shapes do seem to matter, at least according to the creator of MyPillow. By that, I don’t mean it needs to be like the MyPillow shapes, but rather any unprecedented design which the general concensus agrees is comfortable. Not to mention adaptable (i.e. overstuffed for firm-lovers and understuffed for soft-lovers)