A novel printing channel design for multi-material extrusion additive manufacturing

University of Manchester, Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering Department, M13 9PR, United Kingdom

^* Corresponding author: pinar.urhal@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Abstract

Additive manufacturing has a great potential in terms of its capability to produce components with complex geometries and to make multi-material and composite products by combining different materials in a single manufacturing platform. Current trends for the multi-material extrusion additive manufacturing process are categorized by multi-nozzle systems and multi-material inlet systems. In the case of multiple nozzle system, materials are deposited from different nozzles in sequence. On the other hand, in the case of multi-material inlet system, different materials are sent into a mixing tube and deposited as a mixture of materials. In this case, functionally graded parts can be fabricated by changing the volume fraction of two or more materials. Hence, the fabrication of parts with a continuous material supply by varying ratios for the extrusion technologies requires the development of printing heads with suitable printing channels, capable of varying the mixing ratio of different materials. To evaluate the effect of different printing channel designs on the material’s flow pattern and the functionally graded material printability, this paper presents a three-dimensional transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of the two miscible liquid-liquid system in a printing channel. Different geometries and materials are considered