ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING OF COMPOSITE TOOLING USING HIGH TEMPERATURE THERMOPLASTIC MATERIALS

摘要

Composite materials have advantages over other traditional materials in terms of their light weight,rnspecific strength, superior damping capacity, and corrosion resistance. Additive Manufacturingrn(AM) is a processing technique that can be used to significantly decrease the cost of manufacturingrntools and composite molds from hundreds of thousands of dollars to thousands of dollars, andrndecrease the time of manufacturing tools from months to weeks or days. Conventional AM is veryrnslow (~ 16.5 cm~3 / hr), limited to small parts (< 0.03 m~3), and uses expensive feedstock materialrn(> $200 / kg.). Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM), on the other hand, enables the rapidrnmanufacturing (> 16,387 cm~3 / hr) of large parts (> 5.7 m~3) using relatively low cost feedstock. Inrnthis process, thermoplastic-reinforced composites can be used to fabricate large complex geometryrncomponents. This article is an attempt to investigate using the BAAM process to fabricate highrntemperature composite tooling. The BAAM system located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’srn(ORNL) Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) has been used to manufacture a newrngeneration of in-autoclave tools that can be used to fabricate various aerospace composite parts.rnMaterials that are capable of withstanding elevated temperatures, namely Polyphenylene sulfidern(PPS) with variations in high carbon fiber loading (i.e. 40 %, 50 % and 60 % by weight), wererninvestigated. In addition to printing composite molds (i.e. tools), thermal and mechanical data hasrnbeen collected and analyzed for the selected materials.