Development of a novel concentrated solar-powered material extrusion system for producing printed circuit assemblies

Abstract

A novel material extrusion system powered by Concentrated Solar Energy (CSE) for functional small-scale applications is proposed. The open literature has reported that any other system employs CSE to heat the extruding needle directly, which is the main component and function of any material extrusion device and the one that allows the building of the desired product or prototype. Polycaprolactone (PCL) is selected as the depositing material that gives shape to the substrates sheltering electric traces, resulting in a printed circuit assembly (PCA). A set of 15 experiments with different shapes allows the compilation of enough data to identify the exposure time and the direct radiation received as the main variables for obtaining the needed temperature for converting the depositing material to its rubbery state. Examples of functional circuits obtained by this device are included, showing his capabilities and potential. This information and the help of simulations on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software allow finding an expression of the material temperature at the depositing needle's exit as a function of the abovementioned variables. The obtained function describes the experimental equipment's behavior and has an average relative error of 12.6 % compared with the measured material's temperature at the depositing needle's exit. This proposal is expected to summarize the evidence of the CSE's potential for powering some manufacturing systems to obtain consumer goods and that a melt casting system mainly powered by CSE will be plausible shortly.

Keywords

• Material extrusion
• Polycaprolactone
• Printed circuit assemblies
• Concentrated solar energy
• Fresnel lens solar concentrator