Abstract
Due to many basic expired patents of 3D printing technology, the product of 3D printer had entered a high-growth period. There is lots of competition in 3D printers with 3D printer technology of “fused deposition modeling” (FDM) and “stereolithography” (SLA). Although the technical threshold of metal additive manufacturing and the development funds is relatively high compared to other 3D printer technology, many countries have regarded metal additive manufacturing as an important development project due to its potential in the area of the defense industry and aerospace industry. “Electrostatic deposition method” has the characteristic of forming large-area layers in a short time. We studied the process of using the electrostatic deposition method in the metal-powder additive manufacturing technology in this research. The method we used in the research has the feature of forming the layer through the air without direct contact, making it easy to combine with subtraction processing and the potential in the area of surface repairing. The concept of combining additive and subtractive manufacturing is called hybrid manufacturing. CNC industry in Taiwan can add the function of additive manufacturing into their traditional machine tool to enhance their product value. To verify the feasibility of the method, we should study about the controllability of the layer thickness, coverage rate and the surface roughness of the layer. In the first half of the paper, we studied about the spraying method for even coverage of the dielectric film. In the second half of the paper, we modeled the electrostatic deposition process to predict the deposition thickness of the powder layer, then we verify the created model with experiment and analyze the experimental parameter. According to the results of the experiment, the applied electric field and the geometry of the experiment setup would influence the powder forming rate. We investigated the topic of applying electrostatic deposition method in the powder-based-additive-manufacturing with the feature of forming powder layer in a large area and deposition without direct contact. We did the experiments of the process and studied about the parameter and the results of deposition condition.