We’re probably all familiar with adding wood dust, hemp and carbon fibers to PLA filament, but there are so many other fillers one could add. During the completely unrelated recent heatwave in Germany, [Stefan] from CNCKitchen decided to give a new type of biodegradable filler type a shot by scooping some freshly dried cow patties off the very picturesque grazing fields near his place. In the resulting video a number of questions are answered about this ‘PooLA’ that nobody was asking, such as whether it makes for a good filler, and whether it smells bad while printing.
Perhaps unsurprisingly to those who have spent any amount of time around large herbivores like cows, cow dung doesn’t smell bad since it’s mostly composed of the grass fibers that are left over after the cow’s multiple stomachs and repeated chewing have done their thing. As [Stefan] and his colleagues thus found out was that printing with PooLA smells like printing with grass.
As for the practical benefits of PooLA, it adds a nice coloring, but like other ‘reinforced’ PLA filaments seems to trade flexibility for stiffness, so that at ratios of cow dung powder between 5 to 20% added to the PLA powder the test parts would break faster. Creating the filament was also a bit of a chore, for reasons that [Stefan] still has to figure out.
That said, aside from the technically unneeded bacterial corpses and other detritus in cow patties, using grass fibers in FDM filament isn’t a crazy idea, and might fit right in there with other fibers.
I admit it took me a while to figure out the title said “Grass-reinforced” and not “Glass-reinforced” lol
Same here. I was actually quite annoyed that they were not calling it PLA-GF, until I re-read the title properly.
One of those things where they thought of the name first and then winged it from there.
Yup, I wonder how they’re going to go about with PEELA.
Yeah, but once they figure it out, they’ll be golden.
I think some of the problems could have been helped with a different method of shredding the dried manure. Cheap coffee grinders are will known for uneven grinding.
Something something about scientists being so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Hello? Tech support? I love the new filament but I can’t stop my dog from rolling around on the prints.
Here in the UK at least in past centuries it was common to mix cow dung into lime mortar mixes. I’ve often wondered how that came about to be a thing!
It’s still a very common construction in sub-Saharan Africa. Not all areas. But if you go to the middle of Congo or Malawi, you see houses everywhere, made with walls of cow dung. They use sticks, tie them together with grass leaves to create the basic structure, then fill up the walls with cow dung. I’ve seen and smelled the construction with my own two eyes.
If you go to Angola it’s a normal practice to smear cow dung in your hair. Different cultures have different ideas, different practices, different origins. As long as they are happy living in that way, then I’m happy too.
If you’ve smelled with your own two eyes, I can’t imagine how bad it was.
That was mostly due to the flies. Cow dung doesn’t smell bad when it’s fresh but I live in a farmers village. The bread with living ants in it is something I will hopefully one day forget. That was rather disgusting to eat.
As a culture that eats oysters, we don’t have much room to talk.
I imagine in the old days if you were mixing mortar somewhere outdoors there would be cow & horse poop laying around in some quantity almost by default, probably not a big leap to the discovery that a bit of extra dung made it work better.
I believe Stefan’s video got mentioned by Matt in a recent video about using cow dung and other waste products:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TCmjSIj9Jw
IIRC there is progress on spinning cellulose fibres directly from the refined waste rather than mixing with PLA but you’d have to watch the video for the details.
are we supposed to know who the heck “Matt” is?
When the provided link is a video from Matt, yeah.
Finally, PLA gets it’s most appropriate additive. That stuff has figuratively been ST from the beginning, and now it’s literally ST.
I stopped printing PLA the first time I read about someone’s printer melting in their car, about 12 years ago. PLA is fine for tugboats and starwars junk that you expect to throw away an hour after printing, but don’t use it for anything you want to last.
Ah, the requisite burst of anger post from teh interwebz. So helpful, based on personal experience and science, specific and actually related to the original post. Spelled and punctuated properly and encourages further hacks and exploration to boot. Thanks for your contribution!
Also, I too saw glass-reinforced twice, and am still wondering if it’s April in Germany. Regardless of timing and the above useless reply, this is an epic hack.
Most of my filament is expended on prototypes and iteration. What’s not to like about a better PLA without the abrasiveness and particulate hazard of GF and CF.
Gonna be honest this just feels like clickbait. I see no real point to this besides farming views.
I like his channel for the more scientific aspects and this just isn’t it.
“besides farming views”
I smell what you did there.
There is actually a filament you can buy that contains grass. Colorfabb have a filament called “Vibers” which is a PLA with 10% elephant grass as filler.
How useful it is I don’t know but from the description it seems mainly like it is supposed to be better for the environment since elephant grass sequesters a lot of carbon. How true that is or how good for the environment it is I really don’t know but it seems the elephant grass is not added for any sort of mechanical advantage.
As a funny side note, you might want to know what poola means in Romanian. True, it’s not written with double “o”, but with “u”, like the name of the Croatian city or the currency of Botswana.
Hint: It has the same meaning as the other word used for rooster, or the short version of the name Richard.