Research Projects

In the era of recent advancements and developments in the broad arena of product manufacturing and product development, the fabrication of High-Performance Polymer Composites (HPPC) has emerged as an issue of utmost importance. HPPCs are generally fabricated with polymers as matrices and fibres as reinforcement materials. Conventionally, the composite preparation involves preform manufacturing and impregnating it with polymeric resin in the next step. Consequently, the process becomes time consuming and labor intensive. In order to develop complex shaped HPPC, other manufacturing methods could be explored. In the recent past, 3D printing has shown capability in the development of complex shapes. The issues related to the development of complex-shaped HPPC may be overcome by adopting 3D printing. The filament preparation with short fibres and polymer matrix is a quite easier task than that of reinforcing polymer with continuous fibres. The filaments used in FFF are generally made of thermoplastic materials which have high melt viscosity. Consequentially, it is difficult to achieve proper impregnation of the fibres. On the other hand, thermoset resins have low viscosity which helps to achieve appropriate fibre wetting. However, existing thermoset resin-based 3D printing systems do not provide any possibility of in-situ reinforcement of continuous fibres in the parts being printed due to nature of printing. More efforts are needed to combine the benefits of thermoset resins and continuous fibres by proposing a novel material processing mechanism. Therefore, the proposed project aims to develop a novel automated deposition head for printing HPPC parts using thermoset resins and continuous fibres. The developed deposition would be mounted on the six-axis robotic arm to enable the support free HPPC part fabrication with higher strength and better surface finish.