Design and characterisation of polymeric nanocomposites for automotive sector by additive manufacturing technology

Additive manufacturing (AM) is emerging in recent years, not only as a rapid prototyping technique that can help the design steps, but more and more as a proper production mean with intrinsic advantages. However, one of the main limitations is, at the moment, the relative lack of materials suitable for this kind of production. This doctorate dissertation reports some of the efforts made to try to fill this gap, developing new functional AM materials to serve in the automotive sector, as well as in other industrial fields. The work here reported is focused on vat photopolymerisation (VP) techniques, a branch of AM technologies, for the production of polymer nanocomposites. In particular, unmodified commercial desktop stereolithographic printers (SLA) based on the laser scanning system was used, as well as prototypical stereo-thermo-lithographic printers based on the mask projection process. The developed polymer nanocomposite have acrylic mixtures matrixes and silver nanoparticles, graphite flakes or graphene sheets as fillers. The developed materials were characterised with different techniques to gather information on structural and functional properties. Mechanical and viscoelastic properties were increased significantly by the addition of fillers, as well as electrical properties, but, more remarkably, an innovative method for the production of nanocomposite materials was developed.