Controlling Polymer Digital Material Composition With Layering

Abstract

The advances in polymer 3D printing enables multi-material printing of different types of polymer into a single part which is known as digital material. Polyjet 3D printing and Multijet printing (MJP) are methods used to print digital materials. Control of the polymeric compositions is however not made available. A range of digital materials made up of the sane two or three types of polymers with different composition are pre-set in the software with the composition unknown to the users. Layering is a way for users to control the composition. In this project. the method of layering involves manually slicing the computer-aided design (CAD) part into multiple thin layers in the loading direction and assigning eh layer with a specific polymer type to make up the desired composition. The effect of layering was studied by conducting tensile tests on the layered and non-layered samples. It is shown that layering reduces specimen’s tensile strength however this effect diminishes over time.