Photosensitive Formulation for Additive Manufacturing-3D Printing

UV curing is a photochemical process in which high-intensity ultraviolet light is used to instantly cure or "dry'' coatings, inks, adhesives and thin film technology. It has been around as a coating for wood, paper and as a clear coating via photolithography process on printed circuit boards PCBs or integrated circuit boards ICBs for years. It is fast becoming one of the most popular techniques in the paint and coatings industry. Most of the formulation use multifunctional acrylate monomers or oligomers or a mixture of them that crosslink under exposure to UV/EB radiations in a free radical process. We briefly present the advantages of EB vs. UV. A new type of formulation based on multifuctional monomer of dicyclopentadiene epoxy derivative with additional diluent as coreactive solvent will be described and evaluated. This formulation differs from the acrylate one by the use of a cationic photoinitiator. The final product presents all the advantages of epoxy resins viz. better adherence, mechanical and thermal properties, compared to acrylate systems. Formulation has been optimized thanks to the differential scanning photocalorimetry DPC. This type of formulation is developed for additive digital manufacturing - 3D Printing (building layer by layer).