Design and 3D printing manufacturing of complex structures for airflow evaluation

ABSTRACT

3D printing has been established as a versatile option for obtaining complex structures useful in diverse science or technology fields. Heterogeneous photocatalysis is one of the fields where complex geometries are needed to generate parameters such as great surface area and better residence times inside the structures. This research focuses on the design and manufacturing of 3D printed filters as part of a photocatalytic system. The first stage presented here consists of design, manufacturing, and evaluating different structures that could favor specifically our designed reaction system and the mentioned parameters useful for heterogeneous photocatalysis in airflow with polluted gaseous currents. Thus, six different filters were designed based on gyroid surfaces, zeolite (mordenite), and sinusoidal function. Accordingly results of easily manufacturing by 3D printing (SLA and FDM) and the finishing of the pieces, three filters were elected to evaluate airflow on their structures employing simulation of a wind tunnel with the software Autodesk Flow Design and RWIND Simulation of Dlubal, both in 2D and 3D diagrams. Thus, the filters with the most adequate geometries for specific parameters in our system will be probed in future stage as supports or components to assist adequality the toxic gases degradation in the photocatalytic process.

KEYWORDS:

• Design
• 3D-Printing
• FDM
• SLA
• flow
• evaluation
• simulation
• photocatalysis
• air
• filter
• complex
• structures

Acknowledgment

The authors are grateful to Autodesk Inc. and Dlubal corporation for the software version for academic proposes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by TECNM under project 10127.21-P.