Enabling multi-resolution droplet-on-demand metal jetting through tailored pulsing
摘要
Like most additive manufacturing methods, droplet-based molten metal jetting (MMJ) techniques face a fundamental trade-off between printing resolution and speed, which naturally imposes limits on the fabrication of parts. Herein, we present some of these limits and propose a novel method and nozzle design to circumvent them: multi-resolution metal additive manufacturing via magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) droplet-on-demand MMJ. Multi-resolution printing enables high resolution and high deposition by selectively ejecting molten metal droplets of varying size from a single-reservoir nozzle equipped with two orifices. When ejecting droplets from the smaller orifice, fine resolution features can be printed at the expense of deposition rate. Conversely, larger orifices allow coarser features to be printed quickly. The complexity of activating only a single orifice is overcome by carefully tailoring MHD pulses to comply with the characteristic fluid dynamics of each individual orifice. The concept is established using 3D fluid dynamics simulations of a nozzle equipped with two orifices (200 and 500 μm diameter) and validated experimentally with an identical nozzle configuration using an aluminum alloy as the ejection liquid.