engleski

Study of Plastics for 3D Printing of Microreactors

Additive manufacturing, also referred to as 3D printing technology, is an automated inexpensive and customizable process that will make possible for laboratories and small companies to use chemical engineering tools usually used only in large-scale industrial settings. Additive manufacturing comprises of manufacture of three-dimensional physical objects from a digital model. The 3D printer takes the virtual design from computer-aided design (CAD) software and reproduces it layer- by-layer until the physical definition of the layers gives the designed object. The major advantage of this technique is that the architecture can be controlled and new iterations to the design can be made in matter of hours. 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. The selection of materials for microreactor 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, thermal characteristics and the effects solvents (water, ethanol and acetone) of the polymeric materials used in selective laser sintering – SLS, fused deposition modeling - FDM and stereolithography – SLA, were studied by a differential scanning calorimetry and by using swelling tests. 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).

3D printing, ABS - acrylonitrile/butadiene/styrene, PLA - polylactide, PET - poly(ethylene terephthalate)

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