Ideas for lasers and resins

[amirjabri]

Geez this tread is turning into my chemistry notebook I'm really sorry: A few things we can talk about are photocatalysts and monomers (resin). One interesting photo-catalyst known is curcumin, which is a bright yellow dye extracted from tumeric. It has been shown to be a good natural non-toxic photocatalyst for polymerization. Here is some of many references:

http://www.rpitechnology.com/attachm...0_Mkt_Lead.pdf

http://www.researchgate.net/publicat..._and_mechanism

They used a synthetic monomer but others such as Tung oil may work well instead. Would be interesting to see if pure tung oil mixed with curcumin could give a 3d printing resin. It is considered food safe when cured. I'm also interested in using Curcumin with manganese to make a photocatalyst for linseed oil. I found out you can make a good extract of curcumin from tumeric or buy it, then you can use manganese to make a complex using this procedure. It is similar to another manganese photocatalyst which is proven to work well for linseed but this one is also non-toxic!

Here is the procedure I found, but I'm sure an easier one can be made:

Curcumin manganese complex, CpCpx. Manganese ace-tate (0.165 g, 0.65 mmol) was dissolved in ethanol (1 ml) and heated at 60°C . Curcumin (0.240g, 0.65 mmol) in ethanol (15 ml) was added drop-wise to the solution of manganese acetate and the reaction mixture was allowed to reflux for 3 h. The solid obtained was collected by filtration, washed withcold ethanol and dried at room temperature to afford red powder (0.150 g, 54.55% yield).