The development of an active separation method for bottom-up stereolithography system

The Vat photopolymerisation (VP) is an additive manufacturing process that is widely used for prototyping in automotive, medical, bioengineering and others industrial fields. The Bottom-Up configuration a Digital Light Processing type VP printer is getting popular in the market because of the advantage of high detail ability to print objects. But the print size is limited due to the pulling force is proportional to the area of the object and too much force will make the part not able to print. This issue has limited the printable area, life-cycle of the tank and the printing time. In order to overcome this critical issue, an active separation method is proposed. In this paper, an Active Separation Method for Bottom-Up Stereolithography (ASBUS) is described. A prototype system has been build up to perform this innovative process. The real time status of the pulling force is analyzed and discussed. Both ASBUS and conventional process are used to evaluate the pulling ability in terms of large area. Few large format objects are printed as the results.