Mechanics of polymers obtained by layered photopolymerization

The photopolymerization process is a high-precision and efficient technology to obtain solid polymers starting from a photosensible liquid resin made of monomer units. This technology is widely used in additive manufacturing to produce objects whose size can fall within the range 〖10〗^(-5)-〖10〗^0 m. The outstanding potentialities of this technology can be harnessed to tailor the structure of a polymeric material by controlling how the light-induced polymerization process is performed, typically by operating on subsequent layers forming the final object. The present research illustrates the chemical-physics phenomena involved in the photopolymerization and presents a multi-physics framework and the related governing equations. Its implementation within a computational framework is developed and several simulations demonstrating the influence of the AM printing setup on the final microstructure of the obtained polymer are presented. It is shown that photopolymerization-based AM technology allows us to finely tune the mechanical properties distribution within the material domain, enabling the material’s architecture to be tailored to the application of interest.