Additive Manufacturing of Free Standing Structure from Thermally Cured Resins

3D printing or Additive Manufacturing is a class of manufacturing processes for creating three-dimensional objects. In an additive manufacturing process, an object is fabricated by printing multilayers of material successively until the final desired size of an object is obtained. The 3D printing technology can be used for both rapid and functional prototyping as well as small batch production. Stereolithography, Selective Laser Sintering and Fused Deposition Modeling are three common technologies for 3D printing of plastics which employ photosensitive resins or thermoplastic materials as a printing material. Laser and heat are the energy sources in these technologies. \nIn this research, a novel additive manufacturing technology using high intensity ultrasound as the energy source is introduced. Commercial thermally cured resin will be employed as a printing material. For a better understanding of developing a method for 3D printing of this kind of resin, the numerical analysis of the process is performed. In order to get familiar with the 3D printing process, a simple CAD model of an object is printed using one of the commercial 3D printers which work based on the stereolithography technology. Using the simulation results and finding the quality of 3D printed parts produced by a mentioned standard 3D printer, the employed setup for performing experiments will be introduced. Then, the obtained results from experiments are presented. Experiment results are utilized to find the optimum condition for performing the 3D printing with this new technology. Therefore, by applying the optimum conditions and using selected resin, a simple 3D object will be printed. The printing process takes about 10 minutes which is the fastest time for 3D printing. Measured dimensions of a product show that the resolution of printed part is affected by a size of a focal region, accuracy in determination of its location during the process, and streaming inside the cavity.