Volumetric helical additive manufacturing

Abstract

3D printing has revolutionized the manufacturing of volumetric components and structures for various fields. Thanks to the advent of photocurable resins, several fully volumetric light-based techniques have been recently developed to push further the current limitations of 3D printing. Although fast, this new generation of printers cannot fabricate objects whose typical size exceeds the centimeter without severely affecting the final resolution. Based on tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing, we propose a method for volumetric helical additive manufacturing (VHAM) multi-cm scale structures without magnifying the projected patterns. It consists of illuminating the photoresist while the latter follows a helical motion. This movement allows to increase the printable object’ s height. Additionally, we off-center the modulator used for projecting the light patterns to double the object’ s lateral size. We demonstrate experimentally the interest of using these two tricks for printing larger objects (up to 3 cm × 3 cm × 5 cm) with fine details (650 μm) and short print time (< 10 min).

Keywords

• volumetric additive manufacturing
• photolithography
• light-based 3d printing
• tomography