New Network Based Finite Element Method For Stereolithography Process Analysis

Abstract

The additive manufacturing technologies have become more popular in the past years besides playing a roll more and more important along the years. In spite of that stereolithography process are still complex, hard to optimize. In addition to that, dimensional distortion and warpening might be evidenced in several cases because of material shrinkage during the curing phase. On the other hand, the current methods for analysis and simulation only considers unidirectional elements and do not considers material diffractions and incidence angle. For that reason, the current work proposes a new finite element method for stereolithography process using network based elements. In this work, the finite element method is introduced and the interaction between polymerization straight lines and between layers were analysed. In this case, the shrinkage ratio and conversion degree were studied as a function of laser intensity, raster velocity, material formulation. By the end, we indicated the suitable process parameter in order to avoid dimensional distortion and warpening.