Abstract
Existing 3D printing techniques are still facing the challenge of low resolution for fabricating polymer matrix composites, inhibiting the wide engineering applications for the biomedical engineering (biomimetic scaffolds), micro fuel cells, and micro-electronics. In order to achieve high resolution fabrication of polylactic acid (PLA)/multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) composites, this paper presents an electric-field-driven (EFD) fusion jetting 3D printing method by combining the mixing effect and material feeding of the micro-screw and the necking effect of Taylor cone by the EFD. The effects of main process parameters (the carbon loading, the voltage, the screw speed, and the printing speed) on the line width and the printing quality were studied and optimized. To demonstrate the printing capability of this proposed method, meshes with line width of 30 µm to 100 μm and 1 wt.% to 5 wt.% MWCNT for the application of conductive biomimetic scaffold and the anisotropic flexible meshes were prepared. The electrical properties were investigated to present the frequency dependence of the alternating current conductivity and the dielectric loss (tanδ), and the microstructures of printed structures demonstrated the uniformly dispersed MWCNT in PLA matrix. Therefore, it provides a new solution to fabricate micro-scale structures of composite materials, especially the 3D conductive biomimetic scaffolds.
Highlights
Polymer matrix composites (PMCs) have been widely used in the fields of aerospace, automotive, biomedical, flexible sensors, and tissue engineering [1,2,3,4,5] due to their excellent mechanical properties, thermal properties, and the electrical properties [6,7,8]
In order to achieve high resolution fabrication of polylactic acid (PLA)/multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) composites, we present a new process of electric-field-driven (EFD) fusion jetting 3D printing method, which combines the mixing effect and material feeding of micro-screw and the Taylor cone necking effect of the EFD fusion jetting to achieve high-resolution printing of PMCs structures
This paper presents an EFD fusion jetting 3D printing method by combining the mixing effect and material feeding by the micro-screw and the Taylor cone necking effect of the EFD fusion jetting for fabricating micro-scale structures of PLA/MWCNT composites
Summary
Polymer matrix composites (PMCs) have been widely used in the fields of aerospace, automotive, biomedical, flexible sensors, and tissue engineering (tissue stents and nerve catheters) [1,2,3,4,5] due to their excellent mechanical properties, thermal properties, and the electrical properties (electrical conductivity and electromagnetic shielding) [6,7,8]. The fabrication of PMCs mainly relies on the traditional processes such as the compression molding, fiber placement (winding) molding, injection molding, and casting molding. These traditional PMCs molding processes have the difficulties in achieving the complex 3D structures and high-resolution structures, which severely limits their engineering applications. Heinrich et al [5] prepared polycarbonate (PC)/multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) sensors with line width of 600~800 μm. Gnanasekaran et al [11] fabricated PBT/carbon nanotube (CNT) samples with different loadings (0.5 wt.%, 1 wt.%, 2 wt.%, 4 wt.%) and the line width of 300–500 μm. Due to the limitations of nozzle and molding characteristics of FDM, it is very hard for FDM to achieve high resolution fabrication (below 100 μm) of PMCs [22]
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