New metal/polymer composites for fused deposition modelling applications

TL;DRAbstract

Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) has been a leading rapid prototyping process but it has been mostly limited to use in making prototypes for design verification and functional testing applications. The commercial process can currently fabricate parts only in limited types of thermoplastics such as ABS and Polycarbonate. Very little efforts have been made to increase the range of FDM materials to include metals or metal based composites for wider application domain beyond just design and verification. This thesis presents new research in this direction by developing novel metal based composites for use in FDM technology. The principal objective of this research is to develop new metal/polymer composite materials for direct use in the current Fused Deposition Modelling rapid prototyping platform with long term aim of developing direct rapid tooling on the FDM system. Using such composites, the direct rapid tooling will allow fabrication of injection moulding dies and inserts with desired

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