Estudi de la complementarietat entre fabricació additiva i deformació incremental amb materials polímers biocompatibles

Abstract

Polymeric products are all around us; clothing from synthetic fibers, cups, fiberglass, friction bearings, bags, epoxy glues, kitchen cookware, etc. From among all the categories of polymers, thermoplastics play an important role in manufacturing. These polymers can be heated-formed more than once, making them materials very easy to recycle and reuse. Furthermore, industry is bending towards smaller, higher quality and fully customizable bulks. In this context, non-conventional manufacturing processes take over traditional ones. For instance, Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF) has emerged in the recent years as an interesting choice when it comes to custom products, such as medical implants. In this framework, the number of studies about biocompatible polymers has increased during the past decade, and in fact, the applications seem very promising, mainly in the biomedical field. Moreover, some studies are starting to develop procedures involving Additive Manufacturing (AM) into the process of customizing protheses and other biomedical devices. AM has already proven its potential to overtake traditional technologies in some fields. Given these circumstances and taking advantage of the equipment and materials present at the Product, Process and Production Engineering Research Group (GREP) lab, the present work has been developed towards studying the complementarity between additive manufacturing and incremental sheet forming with biocompatible polymers. Two materials have been selected, Polycaprolactone (PCL) and Polyethylene Terephthalate Glycol (PETG)