Tailoring mechanical properties of PμSL 3D-printed structures via size effect

作者：Zhang, Wenqiang; Ye, Haitao; Feng, Xiaobin; Zhou, Wenzhao; Cao, Ke; Li, Maoyuan^*; Fan, Sufeng; Lu, Yang^*

来源：INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EXTREME MANUFACTURING, 2022, 4(4): 045201.

DOI：10.1088/2631-7990/ac93c2

• 3D printing
• projection micro-stereolithography (P mu SL)
• size effect
• microfiber
• mechanical properties
• microlattice metamaterial

Projection micro stereolithography (P mu SL) has emerged as a powerful three-dimensional (3D) printing technique for manufacturing polymer structures with micron-scale high resolution at high printing speed, which enables the production of customized 3D microlattices with feature sizes down to several microns. However, the mechanical properties of as-printed polymers were not systemically studied at the relevant length scales, especially when the feature sizes step into micron/sub-micron level, limiting its reliable performance prediction in micro/nanolattice and other metamaterial applications. In this work, we demonstrate that P mu SL-printed microfibers could become stronger and significantly more ductile with reduced size ranging from 20 mu m to 60 mu m, showing an obvious size-dependent mechanical behavior, in which the size decreases to 20 mu m with a fracture strain up to similar to 100% and fracture strength up to similar to 100 MPa. Such size effect enables the tailoring of the material strength and stiffness of P mu SL-printed microlattices over a broad range, allowing to fabricate the microlattice metamaterials with desired/tunable mechanical properties for various structural and functional applications.

• 单位
  y; 郑州大学; 华中科技大学; 西安电子科技大学; 武汉理工大学