A COMPARISON OF PROCESS PARAMETER EFFECTS OF 3D PRINTING TO INJECTION MOLDING ON MULTIFUNCTIONAL COMPOSITES PROPERTIES

摘要

There has been an increasing need of multifunctional composites – composite with high mechanical properties combined with tailored electrical conductivities for a wide range of applications in Electrical, Electronics, Oil & Gas, Automotive industries and so on. Injection molding as a traditional production polymer process is commonly used and the process parameters such as injection speed, extrusion temperature and mold temperature have been observed to have a significant impact on composites properties especially electrical conductivity. In recent years, Additive Manufacturing/3D printing of polymer composites has progressed significantly and been feasible for production scale process as the print speed increasing by 10x. Meanwhile, newer printers are launched with the capabilities printing high performance engineering polymers. Similar to injection molding, the 3D printing process parameters have big effect on composites properties, which include extrusion temp, print speed, bed temp and nozzle size. This paper is focused on the comparison between injection molding and 3D printing process(specifically fused deposition modelling (FDM)), and the effect of process parameters on Nylon-CNT composites properties respectively, as well as the study of process-structure-property relationship at the fundamental level.