UV-Assisted 3D Printing of Pdc Fiber Reinforced Polymer Matrix Composite

Three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies are nowadays widely employed in several different engineering fields such as mechanical, biomedical, aerospace, and electronics. The possibility to create and modify a digital model and rapidly convert it into a physical object employing 3D printing has opened many opportunities in terms of product customization, process cost reduction, and design versatility. A large range of accessible applications can be correlated with the large number of currently available 3D printing technologies that allow us to process a constantly increasing number of materials, including polymers, metals, powders, fibers, ceramics, clay, and food. Among the most widely employed additive manufacturing technologies in the past few years, fused deposition modeling (FDM) has been demonstrated to be a very cost-effective and versatile approach to produce 3D objects of arbitrary shapes in a relatively straightforward fashion, easily accessible also by non-specialized personnel. However, one intrinsic limitation of FDM is the heating step during the extrusion process, which prevents the use of thermosetting polymeric systems as feed. To circumvent this issue, an interesting approach is represented by UV-assisted 3D printing, in which the feed material is constituted by photo-cross-linkable resin systems that can be cured at room temperature right after exiting the extrusion nozzle utilizing UV-light irradiation.

Polymer derived ceramics (PDCs) have gained extensive attention due to their excellent properties such as high mechanical strength (Young’s modulus of 150 ± 10 GPa, Vickers hardness of 25 GPa – 27 GPa), elevated electrical conductivity (6 ✕ 10-3 S cm^-1), remarkable thermostability, resistance to the corrosive environment and creep. Also, the final properties of the PDCs can be very effectively modified by tailoring the processing parameters, which makes PDCs so desirable. The microstructure of PDCs essentially resembles a network of atoms similar in structure to graphene, with an sp2 network of carbon atoms located at the boundary of tetrahedral nanodomains of silica. In our study, PDC-reinforced polymer composites fabricated by UV-assisted three-dimensional (3D) printing are presented. As polymer composite reinforcement, PDC fibers have gained attention for the intrinsic thermal stability and mechanical strength with simple and cost-effective synthesis techniques. Here, carbon-rich SiOC fibers were synthesized via electrospinning and polymer pyrolysis of a hybrid precursor of Organosilicon polymer and Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP). The resin material consists of a mixture of methacrylic acid esters and photoinitiators. A preliminary study on the use of PDC fibers in UV-3D printing and additional uniaxial tensile tests revealed the efficient effect of the PDC composites for application in the field of advanced additive manufacturing.