In the field of composite materials, one of the most important areas for the manufacturing industry is carbon fiber reinforced materials, which can provide strength comparable to metals and are very light. Carbon fiber has a wide range of industries including aerospace and automotive that need to consider the ratio of weight to strength Application prospects.
Arevo Labs from Silicon Valley in the United States not only provides carbon fiber industrial-grade 3D printers, but also provides new 3D printed carbon fiber and carbon nanotube (CNT) enhanced high-performance materials, and can use the market with its proprietary 3D printing technology and dedicated software algorithms The existing filament melting 3D printers manufacture product-grade super-strong polymer parts.
Recently, Arevo Labs has made new progress. The company is combining carbon nanotubes or other nanofillers with fiber-filled polymers to produce 3D printed materials with excellent mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties.
In the field of 3D printing in plastics, it can be roughly divided into two schools, one is low-temperature thermoplastic polymers, such as ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) and PLA (polylactic acid) materials, these materials are used to add Manufacturing methods to manufacture prototypes and some basic parts. Another high-end engineering polymer such as polyetheretherketone (PEEK), polyetherketoneketone (PEKK), polyphenylsulfone (PPSU), polycarbonate (PC), and polyetherimide (PEI) is used in Medical materials, alternative metals or higher temperature applications.
To improve the mechanical properties of plastic 3D printed products, fiber fillers such as carbon or glass fibers have been added to high-molecular polymers used for additive manufacturing. Although the stiffness increases as the expected fiber load increases, the tensile strength does not increase proportionally with the fiber load of the 3D printed part. Tests on these 3D printed parts have shown that the tensile strength of these parts is about 40% to 60% lower than the tensile strength of the same parts made by injection molding or machining.
In addition, carbon fiber and glass fiber reinforced polymer filaments have rough and uneven surfaces. As the fiber load increases, the surface roughness and unevenness of the fiber diameter also increase. In addition, according to the market research of 3D Science Valley, 3D printed parts will undergo crack propagation, delamination or other failure defects at the boundary. In order to obtain the best material properties for the manufacture of molten filaments, the molten material extruded from the polymer filaments and the resulting nozzle must have a uniform and smooth surface.
Arevo Labs improves material performance and improves 3D printing performance by achieving a smoother and more uniform surface finish on 3D printing materials (and nozzle extrudates used in the manufacture of molten filaments).
In order to improve the performance of 3D printing materials used in melt extrusion, Arevo Labs uses carbon nanotubes or other nanomaterials as masterbatch, compounding, melt mixing, rotating (dry method, wet method and spraying), solution treatment /Or in-situ polymerization technology for processing, resulting in a uniform and smooth surface finish.
Arevo Labs uses scalable robot-based additive manufacturing RAM (Robot-Based Additive Manufacturing) equipment to print composite materials. 3D Science Valley once introduced that the platform consists of a commercially available robotic arm, a composite deposition end effector and a comprehensive software suite. The current software is specifically for the ABB IRB 120 six-axis robot, but the scalable software can also support larger ABB robot models and sizes.
The combination of printing technology and materials may promote the application of carbon fiber materials in the automotive field, especially the application of new energy vehicles, because light weight is a major demand for new energy vehicles.