food-safe 3D printers?
posted in Community by
gogo3d
Are there food-safe 3D printers / materials?
If so, are there any on this site? Thanks in advance!
9 years, 11 months ago
I apologize for not being clearer earlier, but I am not aware of any polyjet materials that are food safe themselves, although they very well may exist. There is a dental material available but you have to have a machine that is dedicated to printing only that. Polyjet will essentially eliminate the problem of voids though and they can achieve much higher finish qualities. That said, polyjet is generally much more expensive than an FDM print especially because it will more than likely be done by a commercial business.
As PrintedSolid mentioned there are FDM materials that are biocompatible such as Stratasys M30i. This material can be sterilized via gamma rays but without such treatment inbetween every use I would not think it to be food safe. http://www.stratasys.com/~/media/Main/Secure/Material%20Specs%20MS/Fortus-Material-Specs/Fortus-MS-M30i-01-13-web.pdf
This thread on RepRap forum is full of good information in regard to plastics, 3D printing, and food safety: http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,164077,168351
If you're still interested in having a prototype printed whether by FDM (I have a Stratasys Dimension but it can't print M30i) or polyjet let me know and I would be happy to provide you quotes for either or.