Nov 22 2013
Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have developed a faster 3D printing process and are now using it to model and fabricate heterogeneous objects, which comprise multiple materials.
Although 3D printing – or direct digital manufacturing – has the potential to revolutionize various industries by providing faster, cheaper and more accurate manufacturing options, fabrication time and the complexity of multi-material objects have long been a hurdle to its widespread use in the marketplace. With this newly developed 3D printing process, however, USC Viterbi professor Yong Chen and his team have shaved the fabrication time down to minutes, bringing the manufacturing world one step closer to achieving its goal.
“数字材料设计和制造可以使产品组件中多个基本材料的受控材料分布可显着改善设计性能。欧洲杯足球竞彩这种制造能力为以前是不可能的令人兴奋的新选择打开了，”丹尼尔·J·爱泼斯坦工业与系统工程系的教授，研究的首席研究员说。
传统的建模和原型方法用于花费几天的时间，但是在过去的几十年中，已经开发了各种添加剂制造（AM）工艺，以更快地制造同质和异质物体。当前，AM流程（例如多射流建模）可以通过铺设连续的材料层来从数字模型中创建一个实体的3D对象，它可以在几个小时内制造一个复杂的对象。
Last year, Chen and another team of USC Viterbi researchers improved an AM-related process called mask-image-projection-based stereolithography (MIP-SL) to drastically speed up the fabrication of homogeneous 3D objects. In the MIP-SL process, a 3D digital model of an object is sliced by a set of horizontal planes and each slice is converted into a two-dimensional mask image. The mask image is then projected onto a photocurable liquid resin surface and light is projected onto the resin to cure it in the shape of the related layer.
Furthermore, the USC Viterbi team developed a two-way movement design for bottom-up projection so that the resin could be quickly spread into uniform thin layers. As a result, production time was cut from hours to a few minutes. In their latest paper, the team successfully applies this more efficient process to the fabrication of heterogeneous objects that comprise different materials that cure at different rates. This new 3D printing process will allow heterogeneous prototypes and objects such as dental and robotics models to be fabricated more cost and time-efficiently than ever before.
In future work, Chen and his team will investigate how to develop an automatic design approach for heterogeneous material distribution according to user-specified physical properties and how to improve the fabrication speed.
Chen和Pu Huang和Dongping Deng是两名USC Viterbi工业和系统工程博士候选人，他们于11月20日在ASME 2013年的2013年国际机械工程大会和在圣地亚哥举行的国际机械工程大会和博览会上介绍他们的发现。
来源：http://viterbi.usc.edu/