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Printing Processes

  • Chapter
Additive Manufacturing Technologies

Abstract

Printing technology has been extensively investigated, with the majority of that investigation historically based upon applications to the two-dimensional printing industry. Recently, however, it has spread to numerous new application areas, including electronics packaging, optics, and additive manufacturing. Some of these applications, in fact, have literally taken the technology into a new dimension. The employment of printing technologies in the creation of three-dimensional products has quickly become an extremely promising manufacturing practice, both widely studied and increasingly widely used.

This chapter will summarize the printing achievements made in the additive manufacturing industry and in academia. The development of printing as a process to fabricate 3D parts is summarized, followed by a survey of commercial polymer printing machines. Both direct part printing and binder printing technologies are introduced. Direct printing refers to processes where all of the part material is dispensed from a print head, while binder printing refers to a broad class of processes where binder or other additive is printed onto a powder bed which forms the bulk of the part. Some of the technical challenges of printing are introduced; material development for printing polymers, metals, and ceramics is investigated in some detail. From the topic of pure printing technologies, we move to the three-dimensional binder printing process, where binder is printed into a powder bed to form a part.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical & Production Engineering, National University of Singapore, 9 Engineering Drive 1, 117576, Singapore, Singapore

    Dr. Ian Gibson

  2. The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 813 Ferst Drive, N.W., 30332-0405, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Dr. David W. Rosen

  3. Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Utah State University, 4130 Old Main Hall, UT 84322, Logan, UT, USA

    Dr. Brent Stucker

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  1. Dr. Ian Gibson
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  2. Dr. David W. Rosen
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  3. Dr. Brent Stucker
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Gibson, I., Rosen, D., Stucker, B. (2010). Printing Processes. In: Additive Manufacturing Technologies. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1120-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1120-9_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-1119-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-1120-9

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