Abstract
The integration of additive manufacturing direct-writing technologies with injection molding provides a novel method to combine functional features into plastic products, and could enable mass-manufacturing of custom-molded plastic parts. In this work, direct-write technology is used to deposit conductive ink traces on the surface of an injection mold. After curing on the mold surface, the printed trace is transferred into the plastic part by exploiting the high temperature and pressure of a thermoplastic polymer melt flow. The transfer of the traces is controlled by interlocking with the polymer system, which creates strong plastic/ink interfacial bonding. The hybrid process chain uses designed mold/ink surface interactions to manufacture stable ink/polymer interfaces. Here, the process chain is proposed and validated through systematic interfacial analysis including feature fidelity, mechanical properties, adhesion, mold topography, surface energy, and hot polymer contact angle.
Highlights
Recent research efforts have opened new opportunities for the integration of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies with other mass-market fabrication techniques
Direct-write additive manufacturing has shown promise in a variety of applications ranging from radio frequency (RF) to sensing and even microfluidic integration [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
Ruthenium and Barium Strontium Titanate inks have been developed for dielectric properties, Li4Ti5O12 (LTO) and LiFePO4 (LFP) have been used for printed batteries, BO3Y was used as a printable luminescent material, and even bio-materials including silk fibroin has been printed with direct-write methods [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]
Summary
Recent research efforts have opened new opportunities for the integration of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies with other mass-market fabrication techniques. New process chains have been proposed to integrate printed circuits on injection molded parts using direct-write onto the plastic surface [29]. The volumetric integration of printed features into plastic parts is enabled by controlling the relative plastic/ink and mold/ink interfacial strengths This process can be further enhanced through the use of engineered injection-mold surface properties and coatings which have previously been demonstrated as an effective solution to control polymer flows both during the injection [31,32] and ejection phase [33]. It is expected that the advantages of integrating the embedded traces during molding will enable a stronger ink/polymer interface and improve surface homogeneity and finish compared to post-process printing methods
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