Development of a low-cost volumetric additive manufacturing printer using less viscous commercial resins

The technological development of the 3D printing industry has been tremendous starting from stereolithography in the 1980 s. Low throughput and surface quality had been the major obstacles to this technology, which offers very limited constraints to the geometrical shapes. In this work, we designed a low-cost volumetric 3D printer that, unlike traditional 3D printers, polymerizes the whole geometry within the revolving resin container. Optimized projections needed for the polymerization of target objects were developed in MATLAB R2020b using the concepts of tomographic reconstruction. The rotation of the resin container and the projections rate were matched to develop the target geometries after the oxygen depletion. Commercially available low viscous Anycubic plant-based resins were used as the printing material. 3D objects of centimeter scale could be manufactured in 30 seconds with extremely low surface roughness in the sub-micron range. The dimensional deviation of final components from the CAD model was found to be within 5%. The overprinting on existing solid structures was successfully experimented with and thus opens the way for future developments. Commercialization of volumetric 3D printers would result in mass production of complex customer-specific functional components which in turn boosts the manufacturing sector significantly. KEYWORDS 3D printing, photopolymerization, tomography, volumetric additive manufacturing
1 | INTRODUCTION The popularity of additive manufacturing technologies is attaining more reach due to their capability to fabricate complex customer-specific components. Ever since its inception in the 1980 s [...]