engleski

Influence of Solvents on Polymer Materials for 3D Printing of Microreactors

Additive manufacturing (AM), also referred to as 3D printing technology, is describing all technologies that build 3D objects by adding layer-upon-layer of material. Additive manufacturing is being used to fabricate molds, prototypes and functional parts with complicated geometry. The main advantage of this type of manufacturing, in comparison with the classic manufacturing, is direct product preparation from 3D model on additive manufacturing equipment, without additional tools [1]. Depending on the technology, materials used for the production of an object can be in powder, liquid and solid form. The most commonly used are polymeric materials (ABS – acrylonitrile/butadiene/styrene, PLA – polylactide, PET – poly(ethylene terephthalate, etc.), but also, less frequently metals and their alloys, ceramics and composite materials are used. Microreactors are reaction systems fabricated in microscopic scale by using, at least partially, methods of microtechnology and precision engineering [2]. The selection of materials for microreator manufacturing greatly depends on the desired application and on several of the parameters: the type of reaction that is carried out, chemical compatibility with solvents and reagents, the type of microreactor, the mechanical requirements of the microreactor, price, availability on the market, ease of production etc. In this paper the effects of solvents (water, ethanol and acetone) on materials used in three additive manufacturing techniques – selective laser sintering (SLS), fused depostition modeling (FDM) and stereolithography (SLA) were investigated. Solvent effect was tested by using swelling tests to see which material is suitable for microreactor production. Also, material characterization was investigated with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). This work has been supported by Croatian Science Foundation under the project entitled "Development of materials for 3D printing of microreactors" (UIP-2014-09-3154).

Polymer, 3D Printing, Microreactors

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