Hi. I have a dentsply triad 2000 curing light for my dental office. I was wondering if I could use that to cure the resins that I print?
Thank you
John
https://www.pattersondental.com/Supplies/ProductFamilyDetails/PIF_90205
We did some trials with that unit and can confirm it post cures resins designed for the Form 2 much faster than the Formcure. It is approximately 5 to 10 times faster to get to the same degree of photo polymerisation cross linking than the Formcure (ON SMALL PRINTS ONLY) It uses a light source that offers not only 405nm but significantly higher power levels of energy at 405nm than the form cure.
The downside is that the bulb has a life of less than 200 hours and its effective area of UV energy is much smaller than the Formcure (which could lead to uneven curing of a larger print)
You obviously are involved in dentistry - so if your prints are for use in dentistry its best to stick with the unit designed for a specific printer.
Not sure about that particular light source, but a while back FL published a UV curing whitepaper that seems to show there are cases where a UV light that is too intense can cause printed parts to not reach their full strength:
Using a higher flux also results in lesser mechanical properties.
This is counterintuitive to the common assumption that more light will post-cure parts better.
Interesting Point, but the photo polymerisation is a limited reaction, speed of the reaction is more dependent on available energy at the required wavelength. Our own tests have shown that here is an optimum point for achieving best mechanical properties in a given time, but both the unit mentioned and the Formcure do not get anywhere near that level of power.
What we found to be more critical (for best mechanical properties) was the temperature, the temperature stability at peak, (soak time at peak temperature) and the rate of cooling when the process (heating) ends.
In terms of best degree of conversion of raw materials to polymerised material (and reduction of risk of migration of uncured materials in a bio medical application) was achieved by using higher powers of relevant wavelength energy.
This article is quite interesting in terms of light power v efficiency of cure (but not mechanical properties) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5568776/
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The whitepaper I linked has a quite extensive set of experiments FL ran with various light intensities and temperatures using their resins.