Verarbeitung von Weichkomponenten mithilfe eines Schneckenextruders in der Additiven Fertigung durch Materialextrusion mit Kunststoffgranulaten

Abstract

Additive manufacturing offers the possibility of producing functional prototypes within a short period of time (rapid prototyping). In this context, many different additive manufacturing processes and associated materials have become established on the market in recent years. Despite the diversity of materials on the market (especially in the area of material extrusion), the different filaments are mostly sub-divided into material classes and not into commercial types. As a result, the end user usually does not know the exact composition of his pro-cessed material. The motivation of the investigations in this thesis is the additive man-ufacturingof original standard granulates with the help of a specially developed screw extruder. In this context, various medically approved thermoplastic elastomers (TPE for short) are examined here. TPE ma-terials also exist as filaments butcan only be processed there from a certain Shore hardness (approx. > 70 Shore A) due to their lower hard-ness and high flexibility. However, since many applications require Shore hardnesses in lower ranges (e.g. seals, medical implants, etc.), the investigations in this publication refer to three materials below the Shore hardness specified above. The investigations are aimed at demonstrating a constant flow rate and the reproducible creation of test geometries from TPE materials.