Solvent-Case D Printing and Secondary Metallic Infiltration for Highly Dense Metallic Structures (abstract only)

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) printing is referred to create objects by adding material layer-bylayer rather than traditionally removing material from a part. In this study, we developed a method to fabricate metal 3D microstructures consisting of 3D printing at room temperature and two following processes: sintering and copper infiltration. 3D structures such as scaffolds and planetary gears with the filament diameter of 250 μm are printed using a steel micro powders/polylatic acid (PLA) composite at a printing speed of 10 mm/s. The ink concentration is up to 98.28 wt%. Filament porosity of copper infiltrated samples is under 0.3%. After sintering, copper is infiltrated into the sintered sample to obtain steel and copper alloy 3D structures. The Young’s modulus of the fabricated structures is up to 195 GPa and its electrical conductivity is 1.42 × 106 S/m, which are almost the same as those of the bulk material