Interpenetrating Polymer Networks for Hot Lithography 3D printing

Abstract

Additive manufacturing has gained increased attention in today’s industry, especially for medicinal devices, yet, their applications are often still limited to prototyping. The reason is that even though complex and individualized products can be produced, the printed parts often suffer from bad mechanical properties like poor toughness. We have tackled this issue utilizing a novel epoxide-alcohol system that can be printed within a methacrylate scaffold. The reactive but brittle methacrylates enables the 3D printing, while the low but mechanically excellently performing epoxide alcohol system provides the good mechanical properties like tensile strength and toughness. While printing of the epoxide network without the methacrylate system is limited to highly strenuous and slow printing conditions, the combination of the two networks leads to 80% increase in printing speed and 90% decrease of light intensity is.

The thermomechanical behaviour was evaluated using tensile tests and dynamic mechanical analysis. The most promising polymers were tested on the 3D printer. The successfully printed parts were investigated under the microscope and via scanning electron microscopy.