The use of silicone in various industrial applications is rising at an unprecedented rate. However, conventional manufacturing processes pose a limitation in fabricating intricate features with this material, which can hinder the development of advanced products that require precise and complex designs. Additive Manufacturing (AM), on the other hand, provides design freedom for fabricating complex geometries. Utilizing AM for fabricating silicone parts can open avenues for innovative product development. However, the influence of AM process parameters on dimensional characteristics needs to be investigated. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to optimize the printing parameters of the silicone-based composite ink for the Direct Ink Writing (DIW) process. To control the optimum conditions of printing, we used a Taguchi-based design of experiment (DOE) and Gray Relational Analysis (GRA). Printing parameters such as extrusion multiplier, print speed, and bed temperature were varied. Responses such as track width, track spacing, and layer thickness were observed. It was found that the extrusion multiplier was the most influencing parameter for track width and track spacing. Print speed has major influence on layer thickness. GRA results suggested that an extrusion multiplier of 0.75, a print speed of 240 mm/min, and a bed temperature of 40 °C are the optimal process parameters. The same settings were utilized to print various LSR/TiO₂ composite inks. The printed samples were also characterized and studied using X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) techniques. The results show that LSR/TiO₂ ink can be successfully used for the DIW process.
Mishra et al. (Thu,) studied this question.