Abstract
Inkjet printing has been used as an Additive Manufacturing (AM) method to fabricate three-dimensional (3D) structures. However, a lack of materials suitable for inkjet printing poses one of the key challenges that impedes industry from fully adopting this technology. Consequently, many industry sectors are required to spend significant time and resources on formulating new materials for an AM process, instead of focusing on product development. To achieve the spatially controlled deposition of a printed voxel in a predictable and repeatable fashion, a combination of the physical properties of the ‘ink’ material, print head design, and processing parameters is associated. This study demonstrates the expedited formulation of new inks through the adoption of a high-throughput screening (HTS) approach. Use of a liquid handler containing multi-pipette heads, to rapidly prepare inkjet formulations in a micro-array format, and subsequently measure the viscosity and surface tension for each in a high-throughput manner is reported. This automatic approach is estimated to be 15 times more rapid than conventional methods. The throughput is 96 formulations per 13.1 working hours, including sample preparation and subsequent printability determination. The HTS technique was validated by comparison with conventional viscosity and surface tension measurements, as well as the observation of droplet ejection during inkjet printing processes. Using this approach, a library of 96 acrylate/methacrylate materials was screened to identify the printability of each formulation at different processing temperatures. The methodology and the material database established using this HTS technique will allow academic and industrial users to rapidly select the most ideal formulation to deliver printability and a predicted processing window for a chosen application.
Highlights
The use of Additive Manufacturing (AM) to construct three-dimensional (3D) structures layer by layer from pre-designed computer models offers significant advantages over conventional subtractive or formative manufacturing processes
All of the data were found to agree within +/-10% between the two approaches, the exception being S3 recorded a 14.62%, S3 had the lowest viscosity of all samples being tested
The presented high-throughput screening (HTS) approach demonstrated a sufficient level of accuracy to be regarded as capable of determining the viscosity of Newtonian fluids in this set viscosity range, because the viscosities of Newtonian fluids are not affected by shear rate
Summary
The use of Additive Manufacturing (AM) to construct three-dimensional (3D) structures layer by layer from pre-designed computer models offers significant advantages over conventional subtractive or formative manufacturing processes The principal of these is high flexibility in product design and the ability to precisely manufacture complex 3D geometries that have previously been unobtainable [1,2,3,4]. Despite significant experimental effort there has been limited success, as materials development for AM is often time consuming and extremely multi-disciplinary This is due to the need for a continuous feedback loop between feedstock preparation, processability of the formulation, curing kinetics, boundary coalescence, dimensional accuracy, surface finish and subsequent evaluation of product performance [10,11,12,13]
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