Enhancement of mechanical and thermal properties of DLP-printed 3DM-ABS BLACK Resin/ZnO composite polymers: effect of content and post-curing
摘要
In a world of unprecedented technological progress, additive manufacturing (AM), or three-dimensional (3D) printing, has become a prominent topic that is widely employed across engineering, design, artificial intelligence, and various industry sectors. Among the available 3D printing technologies, digital light processing (DLP) was used in this study to fabricate composites with enhanced mechanical properties. This work aims to enhance the mechanical and thermal properties, particularly tensile strength and elastic modulus, of DLP 3D-printed specimens based on resin matrix (3DM-ABS BLACK) reinforced with zinc oxide (ZnO) at different concentrations (0.25 wt%, 0.5 wt%, and 1 wt%). Both uncured and cured printed specimens were characterized using several techniques: Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) to investigate chemical interactions; X-ray diffraction to analyse crystalline structure, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) to investigate the thermal properties; along with optical microscopy, mechanical testing and water contact angle measurements. The results obtained show an enhancement on the elastic modulus and tensile strengths of 3D-printed composites, the Young’s modulus rose from 2.26 to 2.55 GPa marking a 12.83% enhancement, while the tensile strength increased from 47.01 to 54.67 MPa (about 16.30% improvement) for the specimen filled with 0.25 wt% ZnO compared to unfilled resin. TGA results showed no shifting in decomposition temperature of the composites at high temperature, indicating that the composites are thermally stable. In addition, the printed 3DM-ABS BLACK/ZnO composites exhibited hydrophobic behavior.