We’ve been waiting for clear resin as that seems to have a good balance of strength and toughness over the range.
We incorporated graphene into it to view dispersion and test against the control with good results. Altho we are still waiting for our weight meter hook to arrive we did some ad hoc test to see real world use.
You can see a 10KG weight hanging off both pieces and right away the difference is clear in bending deflection.
We will have more results soon.
Does this make it more brittle?
That would be relative, the one without will snap before the graphene. The Graphene increases the strength overall but every material has its breaking point. So far I’m impressed, looks like we will be able to use it for functional parts. But with regards brittleness I didn’t see any it still has small percentage of give to it just not as much as the plain resin.
Might be that overall strength goes up but tensile strength goes down, I’m not sure yet.
We need to do more testing to get actual figures.
Update:
We switched to a slow curing epoxy with our graphene as its a much cheaper solution with better strength, saves a lot of UV resin and It is easier to distribute, avoids the heat in sonication or milling with UV.
Some people have also been asking about carbon fiber and the limitation of using chopped strands is that load is not fully distributed across the part however if you use CF tow and wind it within the part keeping it under tension you can defiantly produce a part that is not only incredibly strong but mostly isotropic as its one continuous strand. (When I mean wind I mean twist the tow while routing it under tension on the interior of the part)
You can see the parts one with wrapped CF and Graphene Epoxy and one with just Epoxy Graphene. We are still waiting for full cure around 48hrs but promising solution.
