Monday  |  Salon 10  |  04:50 PM–05:10 PM

#15774, Characterization of Additively Manufactured Glass-Filled Composite Resin for Rapid Prototyping of Mold and Form Tooling

One of the advantages of additive manufacturing is rapid prototyping of parts and designs. As a prototyping tool, designers and engineers can iterate designs and validate interoperability of sub-components in real time. An emerging area of rapid prototyping is the use of additive manufacturing to produce tooling for compression or vacuum molding, press forming, and other technical applications. In these applications, large format prints are required and the tooling properties such as strength, toughness, dimensional stability, surface finish, and wear durability are important. Stereolithographic (SLA) printing methods using solid composite resins is a potential solution for this application. However, the relationship between the engineering properties of the SLA-printed tooling composite, printing parameters, and tool design is not fully understood. In this work we describe an experimental program to quantify the tensile and compressive mechanical properties of a highly glass filled composite material used in a commercial, large-format desktop SLA printer. Digital image correlation is employed to validate whether standard test methods are applicable for the property measurements of the composite. Post-processing effects on the composite resin are characterized by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and the composition of the composite is determined using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). We will discuss the applicability of these methods for predicting the material performance for tooling.

Alexander Landauer   National Institute of Standards and Technology
Jonathan Seppala   National Institute of Standards and Technology
Aaron Forster   National Institute of Standards and Technology