Safety considerations

In addition to the already substantial and often underappreciated dangers of building and modifying a 3D printer, which involves mains voltage wiring and manually installing and configuring hundreds of watts of electrical heating power into a small box, melt electrowriting (MEW) further introduces a high voltage hazard in the same printer. We thus ask readers to be mindful of these risks and to heed the warnings outlined in the official Voron manuals as well as the following information on safely interacting with high voltage for MEW.

Melt electrowriting requires an electrical potential in the low Kilovolt (kV) regime, and a properly designed system can achieve this easily while operating at below 10 Microamperes (μA) of current. Due to availability, the most used high voltage power supplies have a maximum output of approximately 10 kV and 1 mA, but have their maximum current output reduced to 1% (10 μA) for safe operation in case of arcing or electric shock. Since we anticipate readers to build and experiment with these machines, we ask the readers to err on the side of caution and inform themselves thoroughly based on their specific high voltage sources of the dangers and intricacies of their specific setup before they implement their ideas in practice, and consider safety interlocks, warning lights and proper signage an essential part of their experimental work.

Projet summary

This project aims to produce inexpensive, open source hardware for the scientific community, often based on designs of the Voron project or other open-source communities. The mewron repository contains the CAD files and instructions to set up an independent extruder motor necessary for the conversion of a Voron 0.1 to a melt electrowriting (MEW) printer, the MEWron. If you use the files in this repository for scientific work, we kindly ask you to cite the following publication that fully describes the MEWron and its capabilities:

MEWron: An open-source melt electrowriting platform

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addma.2023.103604

Ander Reizabal, Taavet Kangur, Paula G. Saiz, Sönke Menke, Christophe Moser, Jürgen Brugger, Paul D. Dalton, Simon Luposchainsky

Additive Manufacturing, Volume 71, 2023, 103604, ISSN 2214-860.