Research On Material And Sintering Mechanism Of Carbohydrate-based Rapid Prototyping

Rapid Prototyping technology (also known as "3D-Printing" technology) has been widelyconcerned and used in recent years. Carbohydrate material has clean, environmental friendly,inexpensive and non-toxic superiorities, it accords the RP technology’s trend of the desktop.Therefore, the main content of this study was to research on carbohydrate-based rapidprototyping’s materials and processes by analysis and experimentation.Proved that the sucrose is a higher viability of been as rapid prototyping material than theother carbohydrates, the sucrose can be an indispensable material in carbohydrate rapidprototyping. Analyzed and experimented on the sucrose for the basic prototyping, analyzed thephysical and chemical properties of sucrose, analyzed the thermal reaction and the coolingprocess of sucrose, determined the key parameter temperatures and viscosity. This researchfocused on the way of selective laser sintering (SLS) to make sucrose model, so involved inthe design and assembly of SLS-300machine.Researched the sintering mechanism of sucrose and summarized that there are twosintering forms for sucrose parts, namely spheroidizing form and densification form. Thesucrose forming process and some factors including preheating temperature, energy density,power spreading way, monolayer thickness, material mesh number and scanning path and soon that affect the forming quality of sucrose are analyzed. The result shows that energy densityis the most significant factor among above-mentioned factors. Forming experiments furtherindicate that the different forms of sucrose models in different energy densities can beobtained and their accuracy, color, mechanical properties etc. then have a regular change. On this basis, quantitative analyzed the models’ accuracy and mechanical properties byexperiments, the measurements’ deviation of X and Y directions is relatively better relatively,but Z directions is relatively higher, the densification models’ mechanical property is higherthan spheroidizing models. For three phenomena of affecting the prototyping quality(re-sintering, secondary sintering and bottom roughness), propose the workable solutionsincluding deviation compensation, adding accessories, removal of bottom base and the coatingprocess.This research provides theoretical and experimental basis for the different sucrose modelsin different fields, but also can be as a foundation for further research of carbohydrate-basedrapid prototyping.