Metal Additive Manufacturing Conference - MAMC 2020

Lithography-based methods for additive manufacturing of polymers, ceramics and metals enable the fabrication of precise, complex-shaped parts with excellent surface quality in applications like biomedical engineering, automotive and consumer products. Photopolymers contributed 33% to the worldwide materials sales in 2019, thus making lithography-based AM (L-AM) the most widely used AM technology. Although polymers are the dominating material class for L-AM, it is also possible to manufacture composite, ceramic and metallic materials using L-AM. Challenges with the fabrication of advanced materials using L-AM are frequently related to (interlaminar) defects which are incorporated into the parts during processing in the 3D-printer. In order to understand the influence of processing conditions on the finally observed mechanical properties, a fracture mechanical approach will be used. Since AM not only allows to define the shape of a part, but also enables the variation of material properties within the part (gradient materials, digital materials, …), new routes for a detailed scientific investigation of 3D-printable materials are available. Additionally, an overview of recently developed 3D-printable materials (metallic high-performance alloys, strong and tough photopolymers, high-strength ceramics) will be given, allowing to put L-AM in a context with other AM technologies like powder bed fusion and fused deposition modelling.