Design And Implementation Of Curved Surface Conformal 3D Printing System

Conformal antenna was an array antenna attached to the carrier surface and conformed to the carrier.The antenna to be needed conformably mounted on the surface of the fixed-shaped object to forming a non-planar conformal antenna array when used.Conformal antenna be used more and more widely in the emerging products as a wireless electronic communications equipment,especially in the field of aerospace applications.The high precision manufacturing and miniaturization of the conformal antenna was one of the keys to broaden the application of conformal antennas.Nowadays,printed electronic technology has been widely used in preparation of miniature conformal antenna in industry.However,for the conformal structure of different trajectories on different surfaces,there were flexibility limit and precision limit in printed electronics technology.Based on the above background,this paper builds a curved surface conformal 3D printing system.The system used the six-degree-of-freedom manipulator as the mechanical movement body,and taken advantage that included the flexibility of the manipulator in the work space,the high precision and repeatable programming and so on.Using 3D direct writing technology as a process means,the system is combined with the quick response,high accuracy and optional line width and other characteristic of the 3D direct writing technology.Finally,the system used the laser optical system as the realization way.Under the action of the laser spot,the organic matter in the silver nanometer silver material is quickly removed and the Nano silver paste is sintered to obtain the silver wire structure with better electrical conductivity.The data link structure of CAD-CAM-PAC was constructed.The surface modeling was carried out by CAD software and is the trajectory planning of the conformal structure.Then,the tool path was generated by machining way in CAM,and the corresponding tool source file and NC codes were exported.Finally,the NC code was transformed into the robot's PAC language by the coordinate transformation and transcoding.Manipulator procedure was completed in the way of offline programming,and was simulated by the WINCAPS III software.The motion planning of the manipulator in the printing system was completed after the simulation was confirmed rightly.The purpose of this paper is to obtaining a highly accurate curved surface structure.The conditions that effected the printing accuracy were analyzed from two aspects.On the one hand,the system process parameters setting was analyzed,and the influence of the manipulator speed setting and the laser power on the silver wire morphology and resistivity was explored.On the other hand,the interpolation control mode of the manipulator was analyzed.The manipulator control was programmed by linear interpolation and free curve interpolation respectively.And the accuracy of the two interpolation control modes was analyzed.The high precision machining of the miniature conformal structure on different surfaces was completed,and some parameters of the hemisphere double helix antenna structure were tested and analyzed.This paper also completes the experiment of filling the specified area on the curved surface.The experimental results show that the method of manufacturing conformal 3D printing is feasible,which provides a basis to high precision manufacturing of conformal antenna.