Quality Control and Monitoring for Acoustic 3D Printing
Affiliation Type:
Academia
Keywords:
Acoustic 3D printing, Scanning acoustic microscopy, Polycaprolactone
Abstract:
Acoustic 3D printing of plastics is a new additive manufacturing methods with possible applications in biomedical sciences. The melting process of plastic powders and the formation of the prints in acoustic 3D printing is studied to enable on-line process monitoring. As a first prove of concept, a polycaprolactone powder sample is investigated after printing using scanning acoustic microscopy to confirm that monitoring of the printing is possible for various sonication times using ultrasonic signals. The voxel size of the prints is measured for different sonication times and the relation between obtained print mass and sonication time is analysed and a linear relation was found. The melting of the powder becomes visible after three seconds of sonicating a single point. The results indicate that ultrasound can be used to monitor the printing process in situ with the printing transducer and that the quality of prints can be quantified in terms of melting.
