Investigating Multi-Material Additive Manufacturing for Disassembly and Reparability of Adhesive Joints by Precision Heating

Additive manufacturing enables new design solutions across various engineering fields. This work presents a method to enhance the sustainability of adhesive joints by designing joints that can be disassembled and repaired multiple times. The approach involves the use of a Multi-Material Additive Manufacturing process to produce substrates with integrated circuits and electrical resistance, printed using a conductive filament. This resistance can be used to heat the thermoplastic adhesive layer up to 110 °C, allowing for reversibility in the assembly process and enabling joint re-use and repair without constraints on the component’s materials and thicknesses. The joints tested after successive assembly/disassembly operations reach maximum strength during the first iteration, which decreases by around 50% after five repair iterations. The focus of the work is on the feasibility of this process, but it is expected that performance can be improved after process optimization. This result could be highly valuable for enabling component in-service healing and the design for demanufacturing and remanufacturing.