Research Information System
ICASEM 4th International Applied Sciences, Engineering and Mathematics Congress, Tekirdağ, Turkey, 19 - 21 October 2022, pp.195
Syringe pumps are essential tools widely used in fields such as molecular biology, chemistry and bioengineering to control fluids in various applications. 3D printing is an emerging technology that gives researchers the opportunity to design novel customized or improved or low-cost tools and gadgets for their research. Thanks to recent 3D printing achievements in both FDM and SLA technology, as well as in printing materials, great innovations have been made in wet laboratory devices. On the other hand, the open source hardware and software movement is expanding very rapidly. In the scientific world, hardware and software projects such as Python, Arduino, RepRap and Openscad were appreciated and started to be used instead of commercial products due to their interchangeable advantages. Therefore many researchers and lab groups have designed their own custom microfluidic flow devices and fluid control systems, including the well-known syringe pumps, using 3D technology and open source ecosystem. In this article, we present for the first time designing a 3D printer plug-in that makes it possible to use the 3D printer itself as a syringe pump without a disassembly process. We named it as "3D printer to pump converter", the 3DP2PC. The 3DP2PC can be mounted on both the X-axis and Z-axis of popular gantry-based 3D printers built on 20x20 sigma profiles. It can reach 0.1mm precision and has a customizable syringe connection hub. 3DP2PC can be controlled via g-code using PC or any other UART supported device like microcontroller or microcomputer. The 3DP2PC costs under $2. The system can be printed using ordinary PLA filaments. The 3DP2PC can be easily integrated to Arduino and Pyhton based applications.