Development of polyjet and binderjet 3d printer

M.H. Kim, H.A. Lee, D.S. Kim
TOPnC Co., Ltd,
Korea

Keywords: polyjet, binderjet, 3D printer, inkjet

Summary:

- Piezo Inkjet The binder jetting (BJ) process is among additive manufacturing (AM) process technology that can fabricate three dimension construction of solid freeform using ink jet printing technology. As this technology uses multi-nozzle, it can high speed fabrication and also it is low cost. But, after fabrication was completed, curing time of jetted binder need at a minimum as fabrication time. And because three dimensional objects which hardening is completed are very weak, it must do post-processing process necessarily to heighten strength of objects. Therefore, in this research, we suggested a material-jetting (MJ) system to analyze and evaluate MJ process technology. And we proposed an improved MJ process that can solve problems of BJ process technology. The general BJ process is method to spout binder simply through printer head on powder, but proposed process is method to cure jetted UV resin by UV lamp after jet UV resin using printer head on plate. The hardening of resin is achieved strongly at early time by UV lamp in proposed method. Therefore, is process that can fabricate three dimensional objects with high speed without any post-processing. - Thermal-bubble Inkjet Nowadays, binder jetting (BJ) technique that is one of additive manufacturing (AM) technology has been notable issue, and has been applied by various fields. This technology has the advantage of enabling high speed printing to be done on the basis of the ink-jet technology and the system to be constructed at a low cost by using the thermal-bubble jet inkjet head. This study developed an AM system for binder jetting type based on thermal-bubble jet inkjet head. The developed binder jetting system is a concept modeler and aims at low-price and high-speed fabrication. For high-speed fabrication, three cartridges were used to control 900 nozzles all at once. Various process tests were implemented to analyze BJ process variables and examine dimensional error. As the result, the dimensional error of part was 300㎛(X), 300㎛(Y), and 800㎛(Z) respectively.