Polymer Engineering and Science, Vol.60, No.8, 1866-1876, 2020
The forming process of polymer melt droplet deposition three-dimensional printing
The polymer droplet deposition technology is a rapidly developing three-dimensional (3D) printing technology, and is becoming a research hotspot. In this study, the qualitative relationship between the temperature-field distribution and the forming quality was determined by using the finite-element analysis, that is, the "birth and death of element" technology, the ANSYS parametric design language command. We obtained the relationship between process parameters and droplet size and droplet spacing through orthogonal experiments, and the theoretically optimal process parameters for droplet formation and arrangement were determined. We studied the relationship between the 3D spacing (W-x,W-y, andW(z)) in the droplets and the product forming quality. We further optimized the theoretically optimal process parameters in the actual droplet deposition experiment, and finally determined the actual optimal droplet deposition process parameters as follows: the jet frequency is 14 Hz, the screw rotation speed is 10 rpm, the printing speed is 30 mm/s, and the printing distance is 1 mm. This article theoretically analyzed the influence of the polymer droplet deposition process on the forming quality from thermodynamic simulation and experiments that provide a theoretical basis for further improving the forming quality of the process.