Injecting epoxy resin to specially designed voids of additively manufactured parts to improve mechanical properties

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (ΑΜ) technology is the future for mass production of innovative and customable products and its use is expanding and growing rapidly to large and small industry over the last years. The wide variety of high technology polymers used by AM technology produces more reliable and quality parts with better durability and increasing capabilities covering a wide range of products in industry. The improvement of the mechanical properties of the materials of ΑΜ parts, considering the low cost to manufacture, makes the use of polymers highly desirable in industry. Nevertheless, the limited strength of the produced parts is one of the main factors in the difficulty of disseminating this technology to mass production. In this paper, we describe a new methodology of constructing and strengthening products using AM technology by injecting epoxy resin to the inner structure of the produced parts to increase the strength and to optimise the mechanical properties of the products in a manageable and predictable way. The main objective is to design an inner grid consisting of tubular voids using the concept of design intent through a parametric CAD system and to fill those voids using epoxy resin controlling the mechanical behaviour of the produced parts.