SIEM measurements of ultimate tensile strength and tensile modulus of jetted, UV-cured epoxy resin microsamples

Resin jetting with piezo print-heads is in increasing use, and in the rapid prototyping industry the merging quality between adjacent droplets will determine the mechanical properties and reliability of the products. Therefore, it is essential to find an experimental technique to ensure seamless inter-droplet merging. Speckle interferometry with electron microscopy (SIEM) is a micro-mechanics measurement technique that has a spatial resolution approaching a few nanometers. In this paper, SIEM is successfully applied to measure the ultimate tensile stress and tensile modulus of jetted, UV-cured cationic resin microsamples. Results show that the microsamples exhibit similar properties to the bulk material properties and that jetting two layers on top of each other is not detrimental to the material properties.