A study on reduction of processing time and improvement of strength by using photopolymer resin in the 3DP process with powder base

Abstract

The 3DP technology is one of the additive manufacturing technologies that have recently come into the spotlight and are being applied to various fields. This technology has the advantage of enabling high speed printing which, is done on the basis of the ink-jet technology and the system to be constructed at a low cost. However, it has also the negative side that requires extra time for curing after 3D shape fabrication. On the other hand a postprocessing period is meant to increase the mechanical strength of the product. Therefore, in this study, an innovative 3DP process is recommended to improve the strength of product without any postprocessing. To verify the feasibility of the proposed process, a 3DP system was developed to test the mechanical strength experiment of the fabricated specimens. As a result, it was confirmed that the specimens fabricated by the proposed process had three times higher compression and yield strength than post-processed systems for improving the strength through the conventional thermal bubble jet process. To this effect, a proposed 3DP process would remarkably reduce the total fabrication time because there is no dry time and post-processing time after fabrication in the proposed process.