The Fabrication of Micro Beam from Photopolymer by Digital Light Processing 3D Printing Technology

Abstract

3D printing has lately received considerable critical attention for the fast fabrication of 3D structures to be utilized in various industrial applications. This study aimed to fabricate a micro beam with digital light processing (DLP) based 3D printing technology. Compound technology and essential coefficients of the 3D printing operation were applied. To observe the success of the DLP method, it was compared with another fabrication method, called projection micro-stereolithography (PμSL). Evaluation experiments showed that the 3D printer could print materials with smaller than 86.7 µm dimension properties. The micro beam that moves in one direction (y-axis) was designed using the determined criteria. Though the same design was used for the DLP and PμSL methods, the supporting structures were not manufactured with PμSL. The micro beam was fabricated by removing the supports from the original design in PμSL. Though 3 μm diameter supports could be produced with the DLP, it was not possible to fabricate them with PμSL. Besides, DLP was found to be better than PμSL for the fabrication of complex, non-symmetric support structures. The presented results in this study demonstrate the efficiency of 3D printing technology and the simplicity of manufacturing a micro beam using the DLP method with speed and high sensitivity.

Photopolymerization-based additive manufacturing of ceramics: A systematic review

“…The projector is a mask-like device responsible for the projection of the image through the photosensitive liquid resin. In fact, the need for mask as light projector makes DLP more expensive when compared to SL [132,133]. DLP can be used to produce high resolution image with minimum size less than 50 µm [6].…”

Additive Manufacture of Small-Scale Metamaterial Structures for Acoustic and Ultrasonic Applications

“…Notably, a micro-beam was fabricated using DLP with a layer thickness of 30 µm and an exposure time of 3 s (per layer) [114]. The printed micro-beam is displayed in Figure 17, taken from a microscope image.…”

Applications of Wavelet Transform and Wavelet Packet Transform to Detect the Crack in Micro Beams

“…We had chosen poly crystalline silicon as device material due to its unique properties in fabricating micro structured devices [15]. Material properties of Poisson ratio -0.22, Density -2320kg/m 3 and young's modulus-160Gpa is chosen.…”