Has anyone made a heated batch so the resin could be warmed to ~40-50C?
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Has anyone made a heated batch so the resin could be warmed to ~40-50C?
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I would love to come to CAMX but I am based in Australia. It is on my list of things to go to so I will make it there one day. In any case having a look at your base formulas would be awesome.
My company, allnex, makes UV curable resins, that is, we make the polymers and diluents that can be used to make a fully formulated matrix material. I know in the composites world, the term "resins" can mean a ready to use material, but that's not what we usually make. That being said, we do have some generic starting point formulations and properties I can share with you.
Will you be at CAMX? Maybe we can talk futher at that show?
Ok, that changes things...a lot. What kind of filament are you using? carbon, glass, bassalt, etc.? and what resin? do you have a data sheet? I can see uv resins working with glass but would be very difficult to get a good cure with opaque filaments like bassalt and carbon. But it's hard to tell anything without the resin data. Some uv resins work well when heated, others it can produce to high of temperature when curing and can cause microfractures in the final product. In any case I would be interested to see the results on your experiments.
If you are really keen on heating the resin bath... I would suggest starting with a small 3d printer 12v heated bed with a few thermistors sitting under the bath, and in the resin. With a good PID arduino setup you can accuratly get the temp of the resin to 40-50 degrees. The thermistor on the bed is to monitor the bed tempreture and the thermistor in the bath is to accuratly monitor the resin temp (the 2 temperatures are not linear). The bed temperature should never exceed the maximum temperature you set it at (say 55 degrees). This way the resin will heat slowy and not cook/boil the bottom layer of resin on the resin bath.
Not sure of your background or skill set but if you need a hand with the electronics or software let me know.
Again, interested to see the outcome of your experiments.
All true IF your system is a thermal cure. However, I am working with UV curable resins, and they only react when exposed to UV energy, not heat. Some UV resins have very high viscosities, and while they can be reduced with diluents, it would also be extremely useful to use heat as a way to drop viscosity as well.
If you heat the resin up the viscosity drops, which is great for wetout of the fibre. However you are essentially forcing the exothermic reaction in your resin as well. So your 60 minute resin could become a 15 minute resin.
If the only reason you want to do this is to wet out the fibres faster then you should probably be looking more into the roller design in the resin bath itself.
Heated resin bath