Abstract

Over the past years, the manufacturing industry has witnessed a great enhancement in the field of Additive Manufacturing that allows forming an inchoate market to produce custom-made products with low unit costs. At the same time, everyone may be a designer as well. However, the required equipment is only accessible for all the people. The Cloud Manufacturing aims to resolve this challenge by connecting the customers to the manufacturers. Therefore, this paper introduces a practical fabrication method for 3D printers which can bring flexibility and benefits to cloud manufacturing scheme. A model of this integration is provided and implemented on two types of 3D printers. Further, by printing sample specimens, the advantages of this approach such as using low memory size for operating each printer and the ability of changing the design during the fabrication process is described in details.

Abstract

In the last years, 3D printing is attracting the interest from the industry and scientific community because of the reduction of manufacturing times and machining processes. Furthermore, it is important to develop materials with new functionalities or enhanced properties regarding the currently available materials

In this context, the addition of nanoparticles, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), is arousing much interest. More specifically, CNTs have a vast potential in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications, due to their piezoresistive behaviour and tunnelling conduction mechanisms providing a great electrical sensitivity under strain.

The present study aims to exploit those CNT capabilities for SHM purposes, combining them with the 3D printing manufacturing technology. To achieve this, Digital Light Processing (DLP) 3D printing technique has been used to obtain composite materials based on a commercial resin doped with CNTs, by varying the nanoparticles content.

First results obtained for tensile and flexural tests show an electrical sensitivity slightly higher to the typical values of metallic gauges, thus, proving a high potential for strain monitoring applications.