Ideas for lasers and resins

[amirjabri]

So you mentioned earlier that oils have to be pre-processed to make them viable for catalyzation into resin, I'm assuming this isn't something someone at home can just do with a sauce pan on a stove or we'd have resin recepies all over the place (While I have found one DIY photopolymer how-to, it had about twelve components and looked a whole lot more complex than what you're describing.)

Besides, vegetable oil and Cumin sounds more like the start of a good stir fry than a hard plastic.

Lol I was getting hungry thinking of it myself! I love curry! With linseed oil you need to pre-oxidize it to make it more viscous and full of peroxides so that when you finally zap it with light its ready to go. If you use virgin linseed oil it won't do anything unless you have a good catalyst. I was planning on using a small vial to test by heating up like 20ml of virgin flax oil in air (or using a fish tank bubbler to get air mixed in nicely). I will probably add some of the spent manganese dioxide from an alkaline battery as catalyst (not toxic I checked) to speed up this step. In a few hours it should get thicker because the polymerization has started. I don't want it fully cured though so I'll probably take some of the thickened flax oil and then see if a thin layer can cure with a 100mw 405nm laser. If it cures fast enough it should be usable for 3d printing!

In fact people have been making polymers for hundreds of years in cooking: they use flax oil to season cast iron cookware! In fact what they do is spread a thin layer of flax on bare iron, then they bake it to polymerize the flax and keep the surface from rusting.

[Feign]

So, after diving into Wikipedia and my sister's old textbooks for a while, I'm curious to figure out if any monomer can be made into a polymer with the right photoreactive catalyst (and there seems to be a photoreactive equivalents to almost every normal polymerizing catalyst). If so, then it might be worth researching a way to make a UV-curing polyphenylene vinylene. Not only is it conductive (~7 S/cm, or .143 ohm/cm, which is pretty aweful for metal, but huge compared to current "conductive" filaments), but it's also electroluminescient. Meaning that a large portion of the resistance it provides is emitted as light rather than heat.

I'm at a loss as to how I'd take advantage of a conductive, glowing resin without the ability to print multiple materials, but having the option seems pretty awesome.

Polyaniline might be a good research direction as well, as it's apparently rather cheap to buy and conductive enough to be electroplated.

[Anuvin]

You had me at glowing conductive resin. To the chemistry books!

[amirjabri]

You had me at glowing conductive resin. To the chemistry books!

I'll try collecting info if it helps. I saved some articles on the subject to a folder online let me know if you can't download it and I'll figure something else out.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4o1...p=docslist_api

[Londonship]

More than two years on, and I am wondering if you ever were able to produce some edible or soy oil based materials that was able to be catalyzed forming some new materials.