Water soluble, photocurable resins for rapid prototyping applications

Abstract

Rapid Prototyping (RP) is a suitable manufacturing method for fabricating structures with high geometric complexity and heavily undercut features. A special class of such structures which cannot easily be fabricated with traditional manufacturing methods are cellular materials [1]. Rapid Prototyping allows the fabrication of cellular materials on a similar size scale like in natural material-structures (e.g. trabecular bone). By using appropriate moulding techniques, these structures can be fabricated out of a wide variety of materials (polymers, ceramics, composites). In this work, several RP techniques are investigated regarding their suitability for the fabrication of cellular solids. The main focus is on using digital light projection (DLP, a variant of stereolithography) in combination with gelcasting [2] as a moulding technique. Besides using commercial light-sensitive resins, a class of newly developed water soluble resins has been evaluated regarding its usability as sacrificial mould material. These water soluble resins are compatible with a wide range of moulding techniques and therefore offer new routes for the fabrication of complex shapes out of more advanced materials than it is possible with currently used manufacturing techniques.