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poli

I am working to develop an OS protocol and the hardware necessary to produce polylactic acid a bioplastic used in 3D printing from a sugar feedstock. I am a graduate student in biochemistry and have found a material scientist at another university interested in pursuing the project next summer. There is also post doc (in Turkey) interested in collaborating on the bioreactor design and sharing an arduino based controller and code. The plan is to use build an OS bioreactor to hold a lactic acid producing bacteria and control the growth conditions while continually harvesting lactic acid rich broth. Lactic acid will be purified from the broth using electrodialysis or reactive distillation - still need to work out which is more efficient on a small scale. Purification is a weak point of the plan right now and needs input. Polymerization will be in an OS chemical reactor under vacuum with a SnCl2/
p-toulenesulfonic acid monohydrate catalyst. If anyone has any suggestions on where to recruit other collaborators respond below.

Ackhuman

There's a project called "Filabot" that performs what is essentially the next step of your process, which is turning the feedstock into printable filament. There's also a "Polymer working group" forum on the RepRap site, which would probably contain lots of useful info.

4ndy

This guy may be able to help you with reactor design. I'm going to Glasgow later this month, so I may be able to grovel to his team for some help if you can't get hold of them by email, PM me any contact details you would like passed on.

poli

Thanks for the tip, I read Cronin's nature paper over the summer and it definitely shows the potential for 3d printing to revolutionize manufacturing even of chemical synthesis. The "reactors" they made were an application of 3d printing but for polymer production a larger heated and vacuum capable production reactor is needed.

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