Acoustic Field-Assisted Particle Patterning for Smart Polymer Composite Fabrication in Stereolithography

By combining various materials that serve mechanical, electrical, chemical, and thermal functions with controlled local distributions, smart devices and machines with multiple functionalities can be fabricated. This article reports a new particle patterning approach during additive manufacturing to fabricate multifunctional smart composite objects. An acoustic field is integrated into the projection-based stereolithography (SL) system to pattern different microparticles into dense parallel curves or networks in the liquid resin. Effects of acoustic field settings and manufacturing process parameters on patterning are modeled and experimentally characterized. Various particle patterning results are presented. An acoustic field-assisted projection SL test bed has been developed. The feasibility of the proposed approach for multifunctional particle-polymer composite fabrication has been verified.