Kokkola High School Students Get a Hands-On Look at Large-Scale 3D Printing at BIO-2-PRINT

Image: RDI expert Raffay Sultan presents the Centria Plast Lab development environment to students from Kokkolan Suomalainen Lukio.

On 22^nd September 2026, Centria University of Applied Sciences welcomed a group of students and teacher from Kokkolan Suomalainen Lukio to the BIO-2-PRINT project that would enable the next generation to discover the latest additive manufacturing technology at work and the ways in which everyday waste (such as inner bark, boat wood waste and wool) can be turned into something new. The students (16–18 years of age) moved between research presentation and hands-on lab tour.

The visit is hosted by Gurpreet Kalsi, Project Manager of BIO-2-PRINT at Centria together with members of the project team. Mubashir Rafique introduced the students to additive manufacturing, while Raffay Sultan guided the students through the laboratory activities and demonstrated the materials and 3D-printing processes.

From Theory to Lab Floor

Mubashir Rafique opened the door to the students with a presentation of the 3D printing world on the desktop filament printing and to industrial-scale processes like powder bed fusion, vat photopolymerization and directed energy deposition. The talk then zoomed in on the technology at the heart of BIO-2-PRINT: Fused Granular Fabrication (FGF), a large-scale printing process that uses plastic pellets instead of filament, fed through a heated screw extruder and deposited by a robotic arm. Students learned why pellets are better suited for industrial sectors and much cheaper feedstock, easier recycling, and much higher output than a desktop printer.

Rather than just presenting this in slides and not in a PowerPoint presentation, the group went to the 3D printing lab and witnessed it for themselves. The students saw pellets made from an underutilized fibre (such as inner bark, boat wood waste and wool) and they got a front-row seat to how they were formed and how they’ve come in shape in terms of size and texture before and after processing. They witnessed how these recycled and bio-based fibres are combined with polymer to create new printable materials and how the robot FGF printer turned them into real parts.

The results are seen, and the waste behind them

The highlight of the visit was getting to see demo products printed from waste-generated materials— tangible evidence that fibres that would otherwise be thrown away (wood waste, bark, wool) can be used to produce durable and functional products. This was directly related to the work in the presentation— printed test samples for tensile, flexural and impact testing and thermal analysis (DSC and TGA) for example, which are used for the BIO-2-PRINT team to determine how these bio-composites perform differently than traditional materials.

Why This Matters?

Visits like this one are part of BIO-2-PRINT’s mission, as well as the mission to create sustainable, fibre-reinforced printing material, and share that knowledge with future engineers, designers and researchers, not only for future engineers but also for the betterment of the industry and future generations. For the Kokkolan Suomalainen Lukio students, it was a rare chance to see how a CAD model becomes a real, tested, physical object - and how sustainability and advanced manufacturing can work together. For BIO-2-PRINT, it’s an opportunity to prove the progress of the project and trigger early interest in large-scale 3D printing and circular materials in the region’s next generation of talent.

BIO-2-PRINT is co-funded by the Interreg Northern Periphery and Arctic programme through the European Union.