Impression 3D d’outillages de grandes dimensions en polymères renforcés pour le moulage de pièces composites

Abstract

Thanks to the democratization of additive manufacturing throughout the last decade, the large scale additive manufacturing process has emerged and is now growing by leaps and bounds. About ten companies offer a large-scale printing system. This technology is appealing manufacturers from different sectors, raising questions about the performance, cost-effectiveness, and environmental impact of this process. The main objective of this project is to master the large scale additive manufacturing process in order to optimize and make viable the printing of large-scale tooling for the fabrication of composite parts. To achieve this, the project is divided into three stages. Firstly, it is necessary to identify the causes and consequences of the process’s limitations by printing vertically a first large-scale tool. Secondly, the identification of the process limitations, particularly regarding the printing direction and overhang, has led to the development of two methods in order to overcome these. The first method is dynamic printing, which includes non-planar printing combined with variable printing direction. The second method consists of using a 45-degree angled nozzle to bypass the extruder’s inclination limitations, providing greater flexibility. The last stage demonstrated the validity of the previously developed methods. For this purpose, a second complex tool was printed using both the vertical printing method and the dynamic printing method to compare the strengths and weaknesses of each one of them. The development of new methods has thus made it possible to alleviate the printing constraints by offering a material improvement (45-degree nozzle) and a software improvement (dynamic slicing). Furthermore, the printing of the two toolings has helped to better define the current limitations of the process with this type of equipment.

Date	20 Sept 2023
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Simon Joncas (Supervisor) & Sébastien Gordon (Co-supervisor)