3D Printer: Polymer-Metal Component Manufacturing

Introduction

As low-cost desktop 3D printing is now dominated by free and open source self-replicating rapid prototype (RepRap) derivatives, there is an intense interest in extending the scope of potential applications to manufacturing. This study describes a manufacturing technology that enables a constrained set of polymer-metal composite components.

This Paper Discusses

• free and open source hardware

• software for printing systems that achieve metal wire embedding into a polymer matrix 3D-printed part via a novel weaving and wrapping method using

• OpenSCAD and parametric coding for customized g-code commands.

Purpose

Composite parts are evaluated from the technical viability of manufacturing and quality. The results show that utilizing a multi polymer head system for multi-component manufacturing reduces manufacturing time and reduces the embodied energy of manufacturing. Finally, it is concluded that an open source software and hardware tool chain can provide low-cost industrial manufacturing of complex metal-polymer composite-based products.

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