Development Of Three Dimensional Printing System Using Piezoelectric Inkjet Technology And Its Experimental Study

Rapid Prototyping (RP) technology can meet modern manufacturing’s requirements, withits advantages of high speed, cost effective and wide applications. Three Dimensional Printing(3DP）is one of the most promising technologies in the RP industry. The existing3DP systemsmostly adopt thermal inkjet technology, which generates micro-droplets through heating thefluid. This method influences fluid’s properties, especially biological materials, medicalmaterials, etc. The available3DP systems are not consumable for office applications, and themodeling materials are very costly. Consequently, studying the theory of3DP and developinga3DP system with non-thermal effects and lower price has a significant reality meaning.In this thesis, the workflow of3DP, the characteristics of the various inkjet techniques,the fluid dynamics of droplets are discussed. Meanwhile, the process of interactions betweendroplets and powder’s surface, including impact, wetting and penetration, are analyzed. Thiswork provides references for3DP system development, powder materials and solutionpreparation, process design, etc.In order to develop a low-cost3DP system for heat-sensitive fluid, commercialpiezoelectric inkjet printer is changed into3DP system’s inkjet module. Meanwhile, themodularized mechanical system, control strategy, relevant software and hardware aredesigned.Though studying the physical and chemical properties of the ink used in piezoelectricinkjet printer, solution with similar properties is prepared. The influences of shape, size,composition and content of the powder material, and other factors are studied, and the powderformula for3DP is designed. Process parameters, such as powder spreading method, printinglayer thickness, slice orientation, printing time, molding temperature are studied to improvesystem’s performance. Through analyzing the defects of the3DP models, correspondingsolutions are proposed.Experiments verify that the3DP system can produce a variety of common models andmodels with complex surface, such as meshing gears and propeller models. Shell modelproduced contains fine structures such as0.5mm in diam,0.8mm in thickness, with scaleerror within±0.2mm, and printing speed can reach40-80s/layer.