Additive manufacturing of embedded carbon nanocomposite structures with multi-material digital light processing (MMDLP)

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) has become an increasingly powerful technique for fabricating complex three-dimensional micro-architectures for a wide variety of applications. Despite the multitude of AM techniques that support single material printing at progressively higher throughput, larger build size, and finer spatial resolution, multi-material printing of interlaced structures with one of the materials being a filled composite has not been demonstrated. This work aims to demonstrate the technical feasibility of fabricating such heterogeneous structures using a custom-built multi-material digital light processing (MMDLP) 3D printer. The printer was equipped with two resin dispensers and an air-jet that enable fast exchange between the resins—one of which was filled with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) up to 0.25%. The inclusion of CNTs reduced the cure depth of the resins, but significantly lowered the critical exposure required to initiate the photopolymerization. This information was successfully used to select appropriate process parameters for printing complex CNT-filled multi-material structures.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1557/s43578-021-00224-3

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