| Breakthroughs in 3D printed foam may help propel and improve submarines and allow underwater equipment to explore deeper, a team of materials scientists from New York University's Tandon College of Engineering recently developed a 3D printed composite foam Material approach that can be used in a wide range of applications in the automotive, aircraft, marine and submarine manufacturing industries.  The composite foam consists of a mixture of tiny hollow ceramic or glass spheres and an epoxy or plastic resin material that is very popular in manufacturing because of its incredible strength, weight and portability. It is understood that these three features make it particularly useful in submarine production.) New York University scientists believe that the ability of 3D-printed composite foam to produce more complex components with better resistance to compression and physical properties improves the currently used methods of injection-molded foam components. While injection molded foams work well, they require the parts to be joined after forming, as the researchers say, "introducing weaknesses." 3D printing, on the other hand, can make complex parts and thus increase the overall strength of the part. What is the working principle of 3D printed composite foam? Surprisingly, the research team was able to develop a composite foam wire that can be processed using off-the-shelf 3D printers. This is a more complicated issue in terms of wire development, and as the team explained in a recent study, there are some challenges in creating 3D printable filaments, including foam-inhibiting microspheres that print on The process was damaged or blocked the printer nozzle. Finally, they created a printable filament made of high-density polyethylene plastic (HDPE) and microspheres composed of recycled fly ash (coal-burned waste byproduct) In addition to printability, the composite foam The material is also completely recyclable. Nikhil Gupta, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the project, explains: 'Our focus was on developing a filament that could be used on a commercial printer without changing the printer's hardware. Many of the parameters involved in the project affected the printing process, including printing materials , Temperature and print speed, finding the best print conditions is the key to making high quality printing possible. A key element in the development of filaments is to find microspheres of the appropriate size that allow them to easily pass through the printer nozzles without clogging Finally, the microspheres range in diameter from 0.04 mm to 0.07 mm through a standard 1.7 mm Printer nozzle. In addition, scientists have to figure out how to mix HDPE resins with microstructures without completely disrupting and crushing hollow shapes. "Ashish Kumar Singh, PhD and one of the study heads at Gupta, said: 'We want to add Probably more hollow particles to make the material lighter, but more particles means more particles will break during processing First in the filament manufacturing process, and then in the 3D printing process, hollow particles are not Being damaged requires a lot of process control. Impressively, 3D-printed composite foams have shown excellent performance, reportedly comparable to injection molded parts in terms of tensile strength and density, Singh added: "The results show that the performance of the 3D printed composite foam assembly The performance is comparable to the widely used conventional injection molded parts of the same material. The team is currently optimizing materials for the development of submarines that can operate at specific depths, and the team has recently published two separate articles on the study in the JOM Magazine, the Journal of Mineralogy and the Society for Metals and Materials paper. In addition, the team from New York University's Tandon Department of Mechanical Engineering collaborated with a team from the National Institute of Technology of Karnataka, Surathkal, India. Article Source: 3D Tiger |
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