Second day of our agar agar printing tests. Today we are going to try two things. First printing directly with the compressed air extruder and secondly to heat up the syringe and see whether the nozzle gets clogged or not.

Dripping agar agar drop

Do you want more results?

First experiment

We need to set the extruder at the lowest pressure possible, due to agar agar has a really low viscosity. Our equipment is not specially accurate for low pressures or at least the indicator. To determine the amount of pressure, we use a glass of water where we insert the end of the control valve output (tube).

Testing low air pressures

We turn down the valve regulator and start cranking it up, slowly, until the air starts coming out and bubbling. (More pressure = to more bubbles) We are going to set it up to a super “low” pressure and from there once we test it start increasing it depending on the results.

Surprisingly we could set the extruder pressure to a really low values (6 tiny bubbles per minute). The indicator showed a value of “zero” but we could control an agar agar liquid droplets deposition. First experiment CHECKED!

Second experiment

Capsule heated at “55ºC”. Pressure set to a level where agar agar drips every 5 seconds. Nozzle diameter 1.5mm. And same agar agar recipe as day #1.

Heating syringe

Dripping for over an hour, no sign of gel formation inside the syringe. So our new heating system is good enough to keep the agar “hot”. This is great news, but that was more or less expected, the coolest thing is to discover that our control valve can handle really low pressures!

Dripping agar agar stalactite

Checkout our stalactite made from agar agar, we think is super cool! Do you think is worthy to run some agar agar stalactite experiments? WE DO THINK SO!!

Agar agar stalactite

So seems everything is set for an agar agar day #3 to try to start printing. Coming soon 🙂