Abstract
The renewable resource, wood, is becoming increasingly popular as a feedstock material for additive manufacturing (AM). It can help make those processes more affordable and reduce their environmental impact. Individual layer fabrication (ILF) is a novel AM process conceived for structural applications. In ILF, parts are formed by laminating thin, individually contoured panels of wood composites which are fabricated additively by binder jetting. The individual fabrication of single panels allows the application of mechanical pressure in manufacturing those board-like elements, leading to a reduction of binder contend and an increase of mechanical strength. In this paper, the ILF process is described in detail, geometric and processing limitations are identified, and the mechanical properties of the intermediate product (panels) are presented. It is shown that the thickness of panels significantly influences the geometric accuracy. Wood composite panels from spruce chips and pMDI adhesive showed flexural strengths between 24.00 and 52.45 MPa with adhesive contents between 6.98 and 17.00 wt %. Thus, the panels meet the mechanical requirements for usage in the European construction industry. Additionally, they have significantly lower binder contents than previously investigated additively manufactured wood composites.
Highlights
Additive manufacturing (AM) by the use of wood is a way to employ a renewable raw material, virgin or even recycled, which may lead to a reduction of the environmental impact of the manufacturing process
The Individual layer fabrication (ILF) process can be described as a combination of the two AM processes, i.e., binder jetting and sheet lamination
In the specimen with a height of 7 mm, the maximum width deviated by a factor of 1.65, the maximum horizontal area deviated by a factor of 2.73, and the overall volume deviated from the planned geometry by a factor of 2.0
Summary
Additive manufacturing (AM) by the use of wood is a way to employ a renewable raw material, virgin or even recycled, which may lead to a reduction of the environmental impact of the manufacturing process. A large number of investigations have been reported on wood in fused deposition modeling / fused filament fabrication [15,16,17,18,19,20,21]. Granular-based fused deposition processes show high potential for fabricating wood composite parts, especially when the large scale is to be achieved [8,22,23]. To these material extrusion processes with thermal reaction bonding, there are some processes that use the extrusion of paste-like mixtures of wood particles and binders [24,25,26].
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