The major hurdle has been harnessing the high temperatures necessary to melt glass without damaging the 3-D printer itself or interfering with the already formed portion of the printed product --Too hot and the added material could melt what's already been formed, too cold and the and the new material may not properly adhere to the
formed material.
This fact is making possible three different ways to disperse the powders--into a component, into the other, or in the pre-polymer mixture--leading to different properties of
formed material.
Instead, Jacak and colleagues detected photons--packets of light--as they moved away from the newly
formed material, to see how hot the material was.
The system also improved control over the forming process, with variations in the thickness of
formed material now being reduced to just a few microns which has allowed Anson to reduce the wall thickness without any reduction in top-load strength.
The flexural modulus of the
formed material was just 8% lower than that of the unformed sheet, while the tensile modulus was about 25% lower.
In this case and with the mentioned forming technique is possible to "place" a certain property inside the material almost without changing the mechanical parameters of the
formed material. It is also possible to design the fabric in order to achieve a certain property.
Dieffenbacher's new "GMT Problem Definer" calculates three process values for each cycle: total molding-energy input, average thickness of the
formed material, and parallelism and force differentials at the four corners of the press.
For this study ten materials were formed in order to point out the influence of reinforcements on final properties of
formed materials. For each
formed material the reinforcement consist in eight sheets of fabric but they are different through order and orientation.
However, in Hamilton's bolder works, her themes--music, the gendered body in fragments, an unprecedented mix of found and
formed materials, as well as purely sculptural investigations into texture and equilibrium--result in an uncommonly delicate picture of late modernism.
The systems are capable of treating all types of extruded, pultruded, molded, and
formed materials, reports the company.