Research Experience for Undergraduates

I spent summer 2022 in the National Science Foundation's Research Experience for Undergraduates, and I was placed in the in the Additive Assembly Lab at Boston University. In my time there, I was tasked with optimizing their printing process by integrating the pressure system with the NPAQ controller. I am continuing my work in the additive assembly lab this Fall, and will be working to get the printing process as accurate and efficient as possible.

Direct Ink Writing (DIW) is an additive manufacturing technique which uses viscoelastic material to selectively print 3-dimensional(3-D) structures via layer-by-layer deposition. These 3-D structures can have detailed features down to the micro scale. However, when printing at the micro scale, any deviation from the intended printed filament leads to low fidelity prints. One factor that causes deviations is ink accumulation, which is caused by lack of synchronization between ink extrusion and print head movement. In this work, I synchronize the ink extrusion and movement of the  printhead with Position Synchronized Output(PSO) to increase print fidelity. To achieve this, I wrote custom functions that set PSO pulses to fire at specific intervals which turn ink flow on and off during nozzle motion. By implementing hardware, I was able to use the PSO pulses to control ink extrusion, leading to precise printing. To evaluate this method, I compared traces that were printed with PSO and without PSO. Traces printed with PSO showed no accumulation, and yielded traces with more uniform trace width, as compared to non-PSO traces. These results indicate that PSO-based printing is better suited for micro scale printing than non-PSO counterparts.