Research on the curing performance of UV-LED light based stereolithography

The UV-LED light based Stereo Lithography system (LED-SL) was developed. Because of the kinematic behavior of the mechanical scanning workbench, the exposure at the ends of a single cured line is much greater than that in the middle segment, and hence bone-shaped errors occur, which means that the ends of a cured line have larger sizes than the middle segment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the curing performance of LED-SL process and eliminate the bone-shaped errors. The effects of acceleration and deceleration motions of the scanner on the shape of a cured line were formulated and the curing equations were presented. The light switching and power matching scanning methods were studied to improve the accuracy of a cured line. The comparison results of different scanning methods indicate that although both of the above two methods can improve accuracy, the latter has higher fabrication efficiency and larger scanning range than the former. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.