An Experimental Study on the Dynamics of Binder Drops Impacting on a Powder Surface in Binder Jetting Additive Manufacturing*

Binder jetting additive manufacturing (AM) technology has been widely used for manufacturing complex and advanced structures. The binder jetting method creates 3D structures by jetting binder drops onto a powder bed with subsequent curing. While this method can provide fast and efficient non-contact manufacturing with additional design and material flexibilities, it suffers from several drawbacks, such as coarse resolution and manufacturing inconsistency. These undesired effects are caused by the complex drop-powder interactions during the printing process. In this study, we will experimentally investigate the complex binder-powder interactions during drop impacting and curing processes. While a high-speed imaging system will be used to capture the transient details during the drop-powder interactions, a micro digital image projection (m-DIP) system will be used to quantitatively measure the instantaneous 3D surface morphologies of binder drops impacting on powder surfaces. The findings derived from this study will be of great value to improve the current binder jetting AM procedures and develop more efficient and robust AM techniques tailored for fabricating high-quality functional structures in various applications.