Low-Cost Resin for Large Format Additive Manufacturing

Industry acceptance of tooling and components made from Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) using Large Format Additive Manufacturing (LFAM) has been growing due to the lead time improvements, cost savings, design flexibility enabled for large format AM parts (Parts over 3’ in any or all directions), and the advancement of production and material technologies that enable production-quality parts. However, advantages afforded by this technology are not evenly distributed over all geometries needed in the marketplace. Due to high resin material costs, and elevated machine operating cost, some tools and parts produced by LFAM-ABS are equal to, or more expensive than their traditionally manufactured counterparts. Convention in the industry is that unfilled ABS and glass filled ABS resins are not dimensionally stable enough to be useful in an LFAM process and that carbon-fiber filled ABS is the best viable solution. Early work completed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed that part warp and distortion were significantly reduced with the inclusion of the carbon fiber. However, the inclusion of carbon fiber in the resin can increase the cost by a factor of 5. In Phase I of our SBIR, we have already proven printability of our low-cost blended resin, which is approximately 30% the cost of the industry standard carbon filled ABS. The main goal of this SBIR Phase II effort is to fully characterize and make ready for commercial use our blended ABS resin. Completing this research and demonstrating its effectiveness by producing demonstration tooling for our AF Customer will validate the blended resin as a suitable material for LFAM. This will create a “Platform Effect” in which the material can serve as the resin of choice for numerous Defense and Non-Defense applications.