Abstract
Additive Manufacturing (AM) of metals is a potentially disruptive technology that could significantly change the industrial supply chain. There are a limited number of AM methods capable of creating metal parts, and one method showing significant potential is Binder Jet AM (Binder Jetting). Binder Jetting utilizes an inkjet print head to deposit a binder fluid onto a powder bed and bind together powder particles into a desired geometry. This study investigates a new binder system consisting of a difunctional monomer, triethylene glycol dimethacrylate (TEG-DMA). TEG-DMA exhibits excellent printability with an Ohnesorge's number of. 258 making the Z number 3.876. During the thermal curing process, the difunctional monomer polymerizes and crosslinks at the onset temperature of 138 °C, becoming a solid dimethacrylate network. When the binder is utilized within the stainless-steel powder bed at 200 °C, it forms a network incorporating the stainless-steel particles, binding the powder into any specified geometry. Crosslinking the monomer within the stainless-steel 420 powder bed imparts a flexural strength of 1.0–3.3 MPa to the green part depending on the volume of monomer in the part. After sintering, the final stainless-steel parts results in a void fraction close to 60 % and carbon content below 0.4 %.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 101341 |
| Journal | Additive Manufacturing |
| Volume | 35 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2020 |
Funding
This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ). Research was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy , Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy , Advanced Manufacturing Office . The author would like to acknowledge Ms. Desarae Goldsby for her help with the furnace runs, Ms. Abbey McAlister for her help in preliminary experiments, and Ms. Natasha B. Ghezawi for her assistance with rheology measurments. The author would also like to acknowledge Ms. Sophia Lai in her assistance creating graphics for this paper. The author is grateful for a fellowship from the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Graduate Education.
Keywords
- Binder
- Binder jetting
- Crosslinkable monomer
- Green strength
- Stainless-steel powder
