Printing Kapton

I am sharing another my idea.

I was thinking a lot about materials and their sticking properties.
And could say that basically there are two approaches: one is when something become liquid after heating and another is opposite become solid after heating.

I am thinking that it could be possible to combine these. For example print first layer with some liquid like PVA or liquid Kapton and then ABS as next layers. Also it will be possible to print separation layers between supports and object. In this case supports will be removed easily. Or just print one object on top of another with separation layer.

The idea that this separation material should be something that sticks less than plastic like Kapton. From internet I found that Kapton is polyimide and available in the liquid form.
So it is fisible.

What are you thinking about this idea?

Makes sense to me. I think the polyimide is intended to be spotted as a film for MEMS processing, i.e., 10 or 50 micron layers probably is pushing it in terms of film evaporation rates and peeling/cracking

I do love this idea, but i noted a flaw. Without a sticky support, your printed layers would warp (just like printing on cold kapton) so you wouldn't be able to do some features.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/17/2013 11:25PM by Simba.

do you think it is possible to add powdered kapton to PLA to achieve the same effect?

I don't think that would work Simba. They have very different melting temperatures and I don't think you could simply mix them together and get a uniform melting temperature that is a linear combination of the mixture composition. Chances are that you wouldn't be able to mix them at all because crosslinking or some other chemical transformation of the polymer chains would occur in the PLA by the time the kapton started to melt.

actually the vast vast majority of plastics aren't mixable. They would maintain two seperate layers.

For example, laywood is 40% wood in polymer binder (like polyethylene wax). That means one part, cellulose, one part polymer.
In this case, the powder would be Kapton (40%). You could drive off the PLA with high temps.

Therefore you create a printable PLA that wouldn't stick to iteself well (There is tons of kapton blocking it).

For that matter, how is this any better that simply using another material (PVA, ABS, Nylon, laywood, etc) as the blocking layer for support?