Anyone printing urethane springs with Flex for Elastic resin? I need a spring about 10mm OD, 1.5mm total travel and about 130kpa force. Ideas?
I’m not exactly sure what your end application looks like. Is this extension, compression? Also you have given a pressure [kpa] as a force.
Regardless of your application, I am not sure this is going to practically work. My experience with all the resins is that they are subject to significant and ongoing creep - they do not really retain any kind of shape memory. If your application has low-force demands that are very transient you might be OK. Any kind of a sustained force is most likely going to be a no-go.
The spring I need is a compression spring, the same fundamental design as large commercial urethane springs, a hollow open ended cylinder which expands radially with longitudinal compression. Commercial springs are cast, I am looking to see if this could be prototyped with FormLabs resins. Please tell me about the creep in Formlabs urethane. In our application the spring is absorbing the dissipating a variable force from a diaphragm.