Feasibility study on developing productivity and quality improved three dimensional printing process

Solid freeform fabrication (SFF) technology plays a major role in industry and represents a reasonable percentage of industrial rapid prototyping/tooling/manufacturing (RP/RT/RM) development applications. However, SFF technology still has long way to progress to achieve satisfactory process speed, surface finish and overall quality improvement of its application. Today, three dimensional printing (3DP) technique that is one of SFF technology is receiving many interests, and is applied by various fields. It can fabricate three dimensional objects of solid freeform with high speed and low cost using ink jet printing technology. However, need long curing time after manufacture completion. And it must do post-processing process necessarily to heighten strength of objects because strength of fabricated objects is very weak. Therefore, in this study, we proposed an improved 3DP process that can solve problems of conventional 3DP process. The general 3DP process is method to spout binder simply through printer head on powder, but proposed process is method to cure jetted UV resin by UV lamp after jet UV resin using printhead on powder. The hardening of resin is achieved strongly at early time by UV lamp in proposed method. So, the proposed process can fabricate three dimensional objects with high speed without any post-processing.