A droplet production printhead for a novel metal

Abstract

In the last decade, Drop-on-Demand (DoD) metal 3D printing has been slowly becoming a popular research topic, due to its potential for becoming a new cheap and high-quality metal additive manufacturing method. Whilst DoD techniques have proven to work and even have produced a couple of commercial 3D printers, most of these printers are very limited in terms of what materials can they use and what temperatures can they operate.
This research aims to achieve consistent droplet production on an existing prototype that uses a new DoD technique able to use any metal wire as raw material and can operate at temperatures over 1000°C. To achieve this, extensive research on other DoD techniques has been carried out to find how to improve the prototype, and together with multiple droplet production experiments be able to find the best input parameters to achieve a consistent droplet production. To verify the consistency of the droplet production and statistical analysis of the resulting droplet production was then carried out.
An analysis of how each input parameter affects droplet production was produced, together with a set of parameters that allowed the prototype to have consistent droplet production. A droplet sample of 200 droplets of aluminum 6061 was produced, with an average diameter of 1.61mm and a standard deviation of 0.087mm. This proved that the current prototype can achieve constant droplet production, and the research for producing droplets of other materials can start.

Date of Award	15 Oct 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Hao Chen (Supervisor) & Adam Rushworth (Supervisor)