So I started down the road to flexible filament the other day. I did finally receive that material and have had it in hand for a few minutes. It is a rather floppy material to say the least, in fact it is quite flexible, hadn't really expected that initially. I was expecting something more flexible that my PLA but this is really something else entirely. My initial thought for using this material is to make a flexible diaphragm for a thermal heat engine, so in that case this will work rather well I do believe.
This material itself is rather flexible, so we may need to adjust the total thickness to add up to something more or less flexible. The material is flexible enough that bending it is quite easy and can be achieved by hand with no problems. In fact you can barely tell you are flexing the material at all. So again, may need to adjust the total thickness to get what we are after.
The material itself prints readily on my 3D printer, but does suffer some stringing problems on this Bowden tube extruder. I find that printing normal "flat" type extrusions work very well, while stringing materials are not quite so good. With that in mind, I think I can develop a heat engine that will work out readily using these design constraints. One large displacement chamber, coupled with a small active chamber to do the power stroke, and a flywheel to keep everything moving and I think we are getting close to an active engine. Now we just need to test it out...
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