Mechanics of polymers obtained by layered photopolymerization

Abstract

The photopolymerization process is a high-precision and efficient technology to obtain solid polymers starting from a photosensible liquid resin made of monomer units. This technology is widely used in additive manufacturing to produce objects whose size can fall within the range m. The outstanding potentialities of this technology can be harnessed to tailor the structure of a polymeric material by controlling how the light-induced polymerization process is performed, typically by operating on subsequent layers forming the final object. The present research illustrates the chemical-physics phenomena involved in the photopolymerization and presents a multi-physics framework and the related governing equations. Its implementation within a computational framework is developed and several simulations demonstrating the influence of the AM printing setup on the final microstructure of the obtained polymer are presented. It is shown that photopolymerization-based AM technology allows us to finely tune the mechanical properties distribution within the material domain, enabling the material’s architecture to be tailored to the application of interest.