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Design Guidelines of Printing Processes to Improve Electrical and Mechanical Properties for Haptics and Robotics

Abstract

3D printing has been demonstrated as a mighty tool for fast prototyping in many fields. The fast reconfigurability, high repeatability and low cost enables itself to be accepted by everyone with general knowledge in engineering. That is, when the designs and process parameters are given, anyone would be able to simply perform the manufacturing processes. However, resulting from the immaturity of material tuning, tooling design and process control, when printing functional parts with special electrical or mechanical requirements, the printed workpieces are still not competitive comparing to the traditional works of manufacturing machines. In the desire of realizing printing as a production approach in professional applications, we propose this dissertation with guidelines from the hardware improvement in printers to the specific rules in modeling and printing toolpath designs in the fields of thin-film electronic devices, wearable haptic devices, and soft robotics. In the first work, we deposited silver inks with an inkjet printer for high-frequency inductive and capacitive components, which were combined into a pressure sensor to track liquid pressure with wireless readout. Then we turned our focus to extrusion printing with functional materials. For this exploration, a special hybrid printing system was build combining fused deposition modeling (FDM) and pneumatic extrusion printing, as well as functions in force tracking, shear force control and UV curing. The pneumatic printing apparatus was optimized to process an organic actuator material, liquid crystal elastomer (LCE), in order to control the mesogen alignment. As applications, incorporating with silver extrusion inks, two LCE haptic interfaces were demonstrated—including a tactile number-display surface and a kinesthetic glove. To demonstrate the application in robotics, soft LCE actuators and printed rigid exoskeleton parts were integrated into a self-sustained moving robot, which performs autonomous motion under constant light sources with a high payload-carrying ability. We also studied the actuation range of LCE with respect to the quantitive shear control during printing processes, which proved that printed LCE structures are advantageous in topological surface reconstruction. An example of human face model reconstructed by LCE was displayed, showing higher fidelity than other existing works. Details of all our works in the modifications to the printing setups and design rules of the fabricated devices are given in this dissertation, which provide guidelines not only in the flexible electro-mechanical devices we have been focusing on, but also inspirations to the researches in all the digital manufacturing fields as we wish.

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