A 3D Printing Suite for the Earth Institute

Description

It is well-recognised that 3D printing of composite materials is in its infancy. The complexity and quality of the printed parts is limited by the manufacturing process, which invariably involves building the part layer-by-layer. For complex components this can be at odds with the main advantage of fibre-reinforced composite materials whose mechanical properties rely on the layup of high stiffness, high strength continuous fibres in the directions in which the mechanical loading takes place in the finished part. It is essential, therefore, that the proposed state-of-the-art additive manufacturing facility for fibre-reinforced composite components incorporates full six degree of freedom control of the printing heads which may be achieved by mounting the printing heads on a high-precision industrial robot. In this tender we are also looking for a Wax printer and in addition, mechanical and thermal characterisation of the printed components will be determined using high resolution digital image correlation (DIC) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) respectively.