Design for reversed additive manufacturing low-melting-point alloys
Jingchao Jiang, Xiaoya Zhai, Liuchao Jin, Kang Zhang, Jun Chen, Qitao Lu, Wei‐Hsin Liao
Abstract
Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies have been widely used in construction, medical, military, aerospace, fashion, etc. As AM advances, increasing new AM-based manufacturing methods have been developed (e.g. CNC machining and AM hybrid manufacturing). Recently, a new manufacturing method ‘reversed additive manufacturing (RAM)’ was proposed by the authors. First, the designed objective part needs to be reversed using a bounding box, obtaining the reversed outside part. Then fabricate the reversed outside part using AM with dissolvable material (e.g. PLA). After that, fill the reversed outside part using aimed material (e.g. low-melting-point alloys) of the objective part. Lastly, soak the whole part into the dissolvent to dissolve the outside part, obtaining the final objective part. In this paper, design for RAM is proposed. Print orientation, print parameter settings, injection parameter settings, shrinkage, cost and post-processing are discussed. Experiments with several lattice structures are carried out and case studies are demonstrated. The findings of this paper can benefit the design process for RAM, improving the design efficiency for RAM.