Ferromagnetic particle structuring in material jetting - Manufacturing control system and software development

This paper presents a novel integrated material-manufacturing-control system to print parts with oriented ferromagnetic particles. The proposed, designed, and constructed Additive Manufacturing (AM) system, based on material jetting, photo polymerization, real-time control systems, and active magnetic particle alignment control, allows local orientation control of a specialized ferromagnetic suspension in photosensitive resin to fabricate objects with anisotropic ferromagnetic properties. The proposed system builds upon the standard slicing and path planning algorithms used by opensource 3D printing software and extends it by adding two extra dimensions related to the orientation of the magnetic particles within the printing process itself, enabling the online control of magnetic orientation within the printed parts. The result is a successful prototype device and software which produces cured composite materials whose microscopic grain orientations are validated by microscopy. The prototype device shows excellent potential to 3D print materials with complex directional magnetic properties. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.