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pps proceeding
Symposium: S19 - Additive technology
Oral Presentation
 
 

Silicone formulations for additive manufacturing

Crouillere Marie (1)*

(1) IMP@INSA UMR 5223 - Lyon - France

Marie CROUILLERE, Claire BARRES, François GANACHAUD “Ingénierie des matériaux polymères”, UMR 5223, INSA Lyon, France Key words: FDM, silicone, structure, rheology Additive manufacturing is a rapidly growing technical area within which a wide variety of methods have been developed. These new processes provide a higher degree of geometrical freedom when building specific objects for small series production or for custom-made use. The benefits against traditional processes are reductions of time, of cost and of material consumption, thanks notably to the suppression of specific equipment (e.g. moulds). Nowadays different types of materials are processed in additive manufacturing, like thermoplastic polymers (PLA, ABS, PA), metals or ceramics. However crosslinkable elastomeric materials like silicones have hardly been considered although they are widely used in several industries. This study focuses on 3D printing of new silicone formulations, in a view to creating new structures of light densities [1][2]. Material extrusion (or fused deposition modelling, FDM) is used as an additive manufacturing process in which material is selectively dispensed through a nozzle. This method, commonly used with thermoplastic materials, requires a number of modifications and improvements with silicone formulations. In particular, the network, rheology and curing time have been studied to come up with a formulation that both fits perfectly with additive manufacturing and generates good mechanical properties of the finished product. [1] E. B. Duoss, T. Weisgraber, K. Hearon et al., “Three-Dimensional Printing of Elastomeric, Cellular Architectures with Negative Stiffness,” Adv. Funct. Mater., vol. 24, no. 31, pp. 4905–4913, Aug, 2014. [2] A. Maiti, W. Small, J. Lewicki et al., “3D printed cellular solid outperforms traditional stochastic foam in long-term mechanical response,” Nature, vol. 6, no. April, 2016.