Printing Piezoelectric Composite Sensors

Printing Piezoelectric Composite Sensors: Through AdditiveManufacturing Technology

Tselikos, G.

Groen, W.A. (mentor)

Aerospace Engineering

Aerospace Structures & Materials

2016-12-20

Additive Manufacturing technology has gained a significant amount of interest in both industry and academia in recent years. Current research, though, is still mainly focused on the printing of structural components. In the future there will be a need for smart materials to come to fully integrated components. These smart materials include sensor materials, actuators and othermultifunctional materials. In this thesis a fully dense, biphasic, lead-free piezoelectric composite sensor of randomly oriented and low volume fraction filler was 3D printed in a reproducible manner. The influence of both nozzle size and temperature settings on producing a fully dense disk sample has been investigated by microstructural analysis on the cross sections of randomly oriented printed piezoelectric composites of multiple compositions. In addition there is a clear link between the printing settings of layer height and the infill density with the dielectric constant of the printed sample disk. Moreover, a proportional relationship between piezoelectric charge constant and poling temperatures was indicated. For the in-situ fabrication of structured piezoelectric composites of 1-3 connectivity, a concept design was proposed and developed. Through both an experimental and theoretical approach, a parametric analysis of all the major settings that influence performance of the in-situ concept design, was conducted. The analysis indicated that the parameters of printing speed, length between the two electrodes and temperature, influence both the exposure time and the viscosity of the composite filament inside the setup and, thus, affecting the degree of particle chain alignment. Based on this analysis, recommendations on the settings variation, as well as, a possible alterations of the setup’s configuration were proposed.

piezoelectric composite sensor
additive manufacturing
fused deposition modeling
FDM
DEP
structured piezoelectric composites

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b3ec7924-de43-47ac-ad26-90afabbfd5ef

2018-12-20

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016 Tselikos, G.