In the thread of this article and reading this forum,
I was thinking if the following is viable …
1_ Make a conglomerate of resin and metal powder that successfully prints the piece (at this point it does not matter much if it is functional or not).
2_Some the printed object at a temperature sufficient to remove any resin residue (for example, use a heat-degradable resin).
At this point, the heat of the object should have removed any trace of the photopolymer and increase the density of the remaining material according to a fusion of the metal particles?
Oposite the structure is decomposed (The resin degrades before the fusion of the metal or simply produces an unwanted reaction)
Look up sintering applied to powder metalurgy. This process, at least how it’s done currently, uses much more metal particles relative to the material that links the particles together than would be possible with SLA.
On the other hand, this is how you print ceramic with an SLA printer (Formlabs has announced that they are working on such a material a while ago), so maybe the same kind of process is applicable to metals with a bit of work.
You can add aluminum powder to standard clear resin and print. I doubt that you could sinter the material after printing but you can make some fairly heavy parts.
Did this with my Form 1. The aluminum powder might not be good to run across the PDMS with a wiper on the Form2.
This is how the Ceramic Resin that we’re developing works currently. The ceramic particles are suspended in a polymer matrix that’s burned away, and the ceramics sinter together. This could be a bit more challenging to do with metals on SLA due to optical and material suspension properties.
Would be helpful from a development perspective if you included data sheets on what is in the base, so we can engineer the curing profile with additives.