Evaluation of measured and calculated thermal parameters of a photopolymer

Nowadays the designing and the production should continuously develop, so the old product development system has changed radically in the past decades and has been replaced by the so-called simultaneous planning, as the typical method. The bases of this method are the prototypes, on which evaluation is performed very simply and fast. To use these prototyped products as functional part, the thermal behaviour of its material should be characterised. In this work we characterised all the thermal properties of a photopolymer used by PolyJet technology to the further finite element analysis. These parameters were the thermal conductivity, the specific heat and the density. We have concluded that the thermal conductivity and the specific heat are increasing in the function of the temperature. A simple method was introduced to compare the measured thermal gradients with a simulated and also with an analytical model. It was proved that the thermal properties measurements are imprecise, moreover the temperature dependence should be taken into consideration.