Material Jetting: proprietary CyanoacrylateS
Added Scientific were approached by a large materials manufacturer who were keen to understand whether their existing, proprietary materials were suitable for processing by additive manufacturing methods.
After an initial review of the Customer's material portfolio, a project was scoped to investigate the deposition of cyanoacrylate (CA) materials by material jetting and binder jetting.
The project was broken down into a series of tasks, starting with determining the “printability” of UV-curable CA:
Assessing temperature dependent viscosity (Anton Paar Rheometer) and analysing droplet characteristics (Krüss DSA100)
Undertaking kinetic assessment of curing rates using photo DSC
Parameter study to print small films - substrate (PET) droplet spacing, number of layers, UV curing strategy, humidity level < 10%, temperature ~20 degC (Glovebox)
Surface profiling of films
Once the parameter study was complete, multi-layer dog bones were printed for further characterisation and a report produced detailing the results and outlining the steps needed to upscale the process to industrial scale.
Progress was fed back to the Customer regularly through weekly email updates and monthly virtual meetings.
Having established an initial set of printing parameters for UV-curable CA, the next step was to investigate binder jetting of both this CA and a non UV-curable CA onto glass beads. For this, our small-stage binder jetting add-on which is used with a PixDro LP50 printer was put into action. Using this research printer allowed printing within a glovebox so that environmental conditions could be controlled.
A parametric study looking at the effect of changing variables such as recoat layer thickness and binder drop spacing was carried out alongside development of a printing strategy with the aim to increase the green strength of the printed parts as far as possible.
If you have materials that you would like to try, develop and adapt for 3D printing, get in touch!