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Fabrication of Multi-Material Pneumatic Actuators and Microactuators Using Stereolithography
oleh: Qingchuan Song, Yunong Chen, Peilong Hou, Pang Zhu, Dorothea Helmer, Frederik Kotz-Helmer, Bastian E. Rapp
Format: | Article |
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Diterbitkan: | MDPI AG 2023-01-01 |
Deskripsi
Pneumatic actuators are of great interest for device miniaturization, microactuators, soft robots, biomedical engineering, and complex control systems. Recently, multi-material actuators have become of high interest to researchers due to their comprehensive range of suitable applications. Three-dimensional (3D) printing of multi-material pneumatic actuators would be the ideal way to fabricate customized actuators, but so far, this is mostly limited to deposition-based methodologies, such as fused deposition modeling (FDM) or Polyjetting. Vat-based stereolithography is one of the most relevant high-resolution 3D printing methods but is only rarely utilized in the multi-material 3D printing of materials. This study demonstrated multi-material stereolithography using combinations of materials with different Young’s moduli, i.e., 0.5 MPa and 1.1 GPa, for manufacturing pneumatic actuators and microactuators with a resolution as small as 200 μm. These multi-material actuators have advantages over single-material actuators in terms of their deformation controllability and ease of assembly.