Preliminary study on inkjet-based high-speed sintering 3D printing for a polymeric material

High speed sintering (HSS) is a growing 3D printing technology that is capable of producing parts of similar mechanical properties to laser sintered 3D printing with some additional benefits in cost and run time. This technology is proposed to manufacture 3D thermoplastic parts with superior mechanical properties of current selective laser sintering systems at breakthrough production rates (5 to 10 times faster) but a fraction (one third) of the hardware cost. HSS is a layered additive manufacturing process, where the desired area is first printed on the layer of powder material using a thermal radiation absorbing ink and then sintered using an inexpensive infrared lamp. HSS technology uses an inexpensive heating element to sinter the desired area of powder layer in one sweep. This greatly improves printing speeds and dramatically reduces machine cost. This preliminary study investigates the effect of thermal operation condition on product quality (dimensional accuracy and strength) and manufacturing speed numerically as well as experimentally.